#but the other two weren’t so for the purpose of this poll ignore that

[rose-fall]

Q&A

-

General

Q: Why are they furries?

A: ‘Cause I want them to be. I’m a furry and I enjoy drawing anthro characters. I know them being anthros have nothing to do with the story, lore, or symbolism at all but I don’t really care.

Q: Why are there two blogs? Why not just post the pages on this one?

A: I post the pages on a separate blog, @rose-fall-comic, for organization purposes. It’s easier to navigate the comic there than it would be on this blog. The pages have their own tagging system and I don’t want to add a whole bunch more tags to my tag guide just for volume navigation alone, so I feel it’s just best to keep them all in one place instead.

Adaptations

Q: Can I make a comic dub of Rose Fall?

A: Not yet. I know I’ll be ok with it one day though (when that happens I’ll update this answer). Just not now.

Q: Can I translate the comic into another language?

A: Yes, I’m all for making the comic accessible for other languages. As long as you keep the integrity of the original (dont change any story details, don’t change characters’ genders, sexualities, etc.). Make sure to post it with proper credit too, including links to the original english version. I’d prefer you post it either on Tumblr or ComicFury. If you want textless versions of the pages, DM me and I’ll provide you a link to a Trello board that holds textless versions of public pages so it’ll be easier for you to edit.

Other Permissions

Q: Can I submit any of the characters to gimmick blogs? (otd blogs, polls, etc.)

A: Nope. I don’t want the kind of exposure polls or otd (of the day) blogs would give. Or any gimmick blog for that matter. This includes gimmick blogs made to be specifically about Rose Fall too (examples: roleplay blogs, incorrect quote blogs, out of context blogs, confession blogs, etc.).

Q: Can I make a tvtropes/fandom wiki/etc. page/article on Rose Fall?

A: Nope. Though if I wanted a fandom wiki for Rose Fall, I’d make it myself.

Q: Are headcanons regarding the characters ok?

A: It depends. I don’t want anyone having headcanons that changes a character’s gender or orientation (since none of my characters are allocishet) or headcanons that removes a character’s transness or disability. However, I am fine with trans headcanons of characters that aren’t canonically trans (as long as the gender itself isn’t changed) and headcanons that give a character a disability they aren’t confirmed to have (as long as its disability-positive, none of that “this character is an awful person so they must have [insert demonized mental disability]” bullshit). I also ask to not spread headcanons as though they are fact.

Questions That Will Be Ignored

Q: Can you draw this or that for me?

A: I’m not taking requests. I’ll make posts whenever I’m feeling up for it though. But those times will be temporary and they won’t occur often.

Q: What would this character look like in a certain media’s world? / How would this character fit in a certain media’s world?

A: I don’t like trying to translate my characters into worlds they weren’t made for. So you won’t be getting any answers to these kinds of questions. The same goes for whenever I’m open for requests too, I won’t take any requests that are like “draw so-and-so as if they were in this one media’s world”.

Q: What are your thoughts on *insert other webcomic name*?

A: I won’t answer these kinds of questions and any similar because they are not Rose Fall related. And while we’re at it, I don’t want anyone to name drop any other creators here under any context either. To avoid spreading misinformation. If I do ever somehow respond to a question that name drops another creator, the post will be private.

Q: *insert what is essentially roleplay*

A: Just don’t try to roleplay in my inbox lol. If you wanna interact with my characters, you can do so at the ask blog, @ask-rose-fall.

Q: *insert what is essentially venting*

A: We are both strangers to each other. I’d prefer you didn’t vent in my inbox. Please talk with a professional or someone you trust if you’re feeling unsafe. If by any chance I do answer, the post will be private.

[ggreactionsandscenarios]

I was thinking about how the 13th member also their girlfriend would be doing a sexy stage with other members from different irl group's and Yvesoul is just teasing the crap out of their girlfriend saying that she couldn't do the special stage because she's more of a cute type but still encouraging her. (Because, they're supportive girlfriends and that's what we love) but, when the 13th member does the special stage, she pulls it off perfectly. I don't want the ending to end in a smut because I don't know where you stand on that and I don't want to make you uncomfortable, but if you want to do it you can. So, can I settle with an ending that has Yvesoul shocked and the 13th member smug. Remember, if you're busy or just don't want to do my request than ignore it. I don't want you to feel obligated to do anything that I ask. Thank you❤️❤️

Yves x Jinsoul x Reader

"I'll show you !"

"Come on Y/N, you can't do a sexy stage, it's like asking a puppy to twerk !"

Yves bursts out laughing, you just told her about your collab stage with Sua from Dreamcatcher and Soojin from (G)I-dle. Knowing the two other idols, your girlfriend was shocked to know you were going to dance with them. After all they were known to be the sexiest of their individual groups when you were known as the cute and softest member of Loona.

Jinsoul entered the room, visibly curious about the loud fit of laughter.

"What's making you laugh that loud ? Hi cutie, didn't see you there."

She kissed your lips before facing Sooyoung, waiting for her answer.

You crossed your arms and gave a knowing look to your girlfriend, urging her to announce the news to your other girlfriend.

"Okay don't laugh yet, Y/N is doing a sexy performance soon."

Jinsoul looked at you then back at Yves.

"Who's Y/N ?"

And the laughs were back, your girlfriend almost rolling on the floor while the other one was confusingly looking at you.

"What ?"

"Babe what's my name ?

Jinsoul looked at you as if you grew a second head.

"Cutie."

"No, my real name."

Realisation suddenly hit her and when you thought she was going to apologize she just started laughing too.

"Ha ha ha ! A sexy stage? Then what, learn poll dance ?"

"You know what ?! Fuck both of you ! I'll show you I can be sexy if and whenever I want to !"

~~~~~

After that sweet argument with your girlfriends they didn't stop teasing you. They were convinced you were way too cute to do a sexy concept.

You were determined to prove them wrong by showing them what you got and for that matter working with Sua and Soojin was a big help.

On one side you had Soojin showing you how being cute or shy didn't mean you couldn't be the sexiest on stage.

On the other side Sua was not just sexy but the most provocative person you might know and that was something you had to learn from her to get back at your girlfriends.

After weeks of training you were finally ready, you actually never been more confident in your all life. You only had few minutes but you were sure it’ll be just enough to make a show of how sexy you could be to your teasing girlfriends.

Luckily they both came to your performance because even though they didn’t think sexy suits you, they do want to see you perform and cheer for you. You coul see both of them standing near the cameraman, waiting with their lightsticks on, colored with your assigned shade.

As soon as you set foot on stage, you took a glance of them, witnessing the way they gulped at your outfit.

Their eyes were lingering on you even longer than expected, looking you up and down looking for your so called cuteness. Cuteness that was long time gone, erased during practice and hair and makeup.

As expected you nailed the performance your eyes made few contacts with theirs, piercing right through your girlfriends' dirty minds.

Jinsoul was wearing the usual smirk she'd gave off in bed when she was making you moan and you could see Yves' hand that was gripped tightly around her thigh, probably in attempt to prevent both of them to go take you off stage immediately.

They for sure weren't thinking about anything cute right now, you gave them a last teasing wink before you went change.

You didn't bother closing the door of the changing room, you were convinced you won't have time to change anyway.

But the idea of them thinking you'll change before anyone's eyes wasn't anything but alluring now that you were turning your back at the door and thinking about it.

The loud steps weren't long to come, the two pairs of feet hitting the floor in noticeable frustration but suddenly stopped as they reached the door.

You didn't bother turning around and opened the zipper of your top in a slow teasing motion.

If Yves was frozen in wow at the sight, not over the performance yet, your other girlfriend her, was fully awake and didn't let you slid the piece of clothing alone.

She had been longing for your skin since you appeared on stage and wasn't going to wait any more time before having a taste of it.

Her lips found your neck, gently nibbling on it just beneath your ear. You felt her hands circling your hips, brushing slightly the top of your shorts.

As Jinsoul turned you around in her arms, you could now see the fire burning in Yves eyes. Her eyes were admiring your torso, appreciating the last piece of cloth you had over your chest.

Obviously it was one of her Valentine's day gifts, the red material with flowery patterns that she chose was indeed accomplishing its purpose of turning her on even more.

Her hands were visibly shaking with anticipation, still standing in the door frame she didn't even enter the room completely yet.

You reached out for her hand.

"You might want to close that door and come closer."

As if breaking out of hypnosis she suddenly stepped in and smashed her lips to yours, not minding the opened door behind her.

"I'll like it to stay opened. You didn't mind turning us on in public while you were on stage, are you backing off now ? Want to go back to being a softie ?"

No way you were backing off now that you knew how being sexy affects your girlfriend. You never saw her this hungry before, not even Jinsoul would play it this risky with you on a regular basis.

Yet now one of them was still kissing and sucking on your neck while the other was unzipping your shorts with one hand and cupping your breast with the other all of this with the door still half opened.

You thought about stopping them but the kisses were too sweet, their touch felt too good on your skin and maybe the risk of getting caught was only adding fuel into the fire burning inside your stomach.

Yves cupped your face and brought you in for a second kiss while Jinsoul got rid of your shorts. She stood back up terribly slowly, her fingers brushing along your legs while doing so.

Her hands groped your butt, enjoying the laced red undergarment that you were wearing. Her mouth found the soft skin of your shoulder blades and traced kisses on it.

Sooyoung wasn't as slow as your first girlfriend was, she was needy and fidgeting. If you had hypnotized Jinsoul, Yves on the other side seemed rather electrified. She needed friction.

Her eyes weren't reflecting the same fire as earlier, they were rather pleading you now, pleading you to do something to the unstoppable wetness between her thighs.

Her tongue was not just fighting for dominance, it was claiming yours, caressing and sucking yours in an hurried request.

You were still kissing when you felt her take your hand in hers and push it in her pants, pressing on your fingers to play with her clit.

Witnessing how soaking wet she was, almost made you moan.

"See what you did to me ? I need you to fix it for me, can you do that for me, sexy ?"

Your only response was to push her hand away, wanting to touch her on your own. You slid your fingers further in her pants, opening the front to gain more access and space.

As your index finger brushed against her folds you saw how she was dripping for you. Her hands clunched on your shoulders at the sensation, a moan already half past her lips.

As you were caressing and teasing Sooyoung's sex, you felt your panties running down your legs.

"Can I get a taste ? I'm craving to feel you on my tongue right now."

It was actually the first words your Jinsoul was uttering and god you didn't wished for any other than those escaping her lips at the moment.

You looked over your shoulder, answering her with a kiss, your finger slowly entering your other girlfriend in the meantime, making her gasp.

She joined the kiss, kissing you and Jinsoul equally but biting down on your lip rougher. You had her on her knees for you right now.

Jinsoul got between you two enjoying looking up on you before making you open your legs wider.

She kissed your thigh and tummy before getting where you wanted her the most. When she kissed your clit, you heaved a sigh at the feeling. Your index finger joined your major in its thrust in your girlfriend, making her hiss in pleasure too.

The sounds of pleasure coming from you two spurred on Jinsoul's eagerness to make you feel good as she got a taste of your excitation with a lick.

Shivers ran down your spine, your hips bucking forward in want, making Yves moaned at your hips made contact against hers and getting Jinsoul to smirk, proud of herself.

The curves of her lips pushed against your clit, making you rolled your eyes back.

"God I could cum just by seeing you roll your eyes in pleasure."

The words had troubles escaping Yves' mouth as your thrusts became faster and deeper in her. She grabbed your face and kissed you roughly in an attempt to muffle her moans.

You felt her thighs shake as your other hand reached for her breast, pinching on her nipple the way you know brings her on edge.

In one last thrust Yves came undone in your hands, crying out her orgasm in your mouth. As on cue Jinsoul pushed a finger in your heat, her tongue still deep in and her thumb massaging your clit at a fast pace.

Everything felt too overwhelming, too hot and your orgasm too fast. Jinsoul held your hips knowing you wouldn't be able to keep standing.

Sooyoung attacked your neck once she got back from cloud nine, her teeth meeting your pulse point in a slight bite.

Blood rushed to your head in a great finally, your orgasm hitting you hard and making you grab on your girlfriend for support.

She patted your back, soothing your high.

Jinsoul got back up and smiled at you with her beamed afterglow smile. Which was odd since you didn't even heard her cumming, however Yves was faster at asking.

"How did you ?"

"Oh you know the regular."

She replied raising the hand that wasn't taking care of you previously with a chuckle.

You laughed with her and decided it was time to go home. You were getting your clothes back on while your girlfriends tried to make themselves presentable.

As you were about to leave Jinsoul burst out laughing, getting weird looks from you and Yves.

"Babes, neither of you closed the door right ? Because I didn't either and it's closed."

You looked at her in pure shame, your cheeks turning bright red from embarrassment.

Your girlfriends just brushed it off not caring at all about getting caught.

They cooed at you, engulfing you in a hug.

"Cutie Y/N is back !"

Hey, here it is. Hope you'll like it, give feedback 😁 Also I'm still a baby smut writer so bear with me please 😅❤-Ael

[theliberaltony]

via Politics – FiveThirtyEight

Welcome to FiveThirtyEight’s politics chat. The transcript below has been lightly edited.

sarah (Sarah Frostenson, politics editor): Georgia’s new voting law has captured headlines for all the ways in which it makes voting harder. It’s also not the only state considering these kinds of laws; there are nearly 20 states in which voting restrictions have already passed at least one step of the legislative process. More than 300 voting restriction bills, according to an analysis by FiveThirtyEight, have been introduced in state legislatures this year following months of fraudulent claims from former President Trump and his supporters that the 2020 presidential election was rigged. (Sixty percent of Republican voters still say the election “was stolen” from Trump.)

But understanding the effects of laws like Georgia’s is complicated. There’s not really solid evidence one way or the other that this law will hurt Democrats or help Republicans. It’s also a point that elides a more fundamental one: If one party increasingly supports anti-democratic measures, does anything else outweigh that?

Public opinion on voting laws isn’t clear-cut either — provisions like a ban on giving voters food and water (something the Georgia law did) are unpopular, but voter ID laws are broadly popular. So let’s address the politics, public opinion and research on voting laws to better understand the contours of this debate, tackling this chat in two parts:

First, how much does it matter that Republicans’ election security push is precipitated on a lie? That is, as there has been no evidence the 2020 election actually experienced wide-scale fraud, does that undermine Republicans’ argument?

And second, how much do Americans care about voting rights as an issue?

OK, first up — The argument from Republicans supporting these new laws. What do they want in the push for more “election security”? And how much does it matter, at this point, that there wasn’t actually wide-scale voter fraud in 2020?

nrakich (Nathaniel Rakich, elections analyst): IMO, the “Big Lie” is the key to understanding Republicans’ motivations. Everyone can agree that elections should be secure. But …

… the specific methods of voting being targeted by Republicans (almost half of the voting restrictions that have been introduced regulate absentee voting), the states in which they are targeting them (disproportionately swing states), and the timing of that targeting (after Republicans lost the 2020 election) all suggest that they are only passing these restrictions because they think they will help the GOP win future elections.

alex (Alex Samuels, politics reporter): But to your second question, Sarah, this is the narrative conservative lawmakers and many of their voters have bought into, right? That the 2020 election was supposedly stolen from Trump?

There was never — and still is no — evidence of massive voter fraud that Trump and his allies stated as fact. But because it was repeated so many times and with such certainty, large parts of the GOP electorate came to believe it. 

As long as the “Big Lie” continues to be pervasive, we’re going to keep seeing these efforts to get these restrictions passed, as Nathaniel notes.

nrakich: Alex, it’s an interesting question whether these Republican legislators actually believe that rampant voter fraud cost Trump the election or they are just going along with it because it’s politically convenient. But I’m also not sure it matters. Either way, they are making policy based on a conspiracy theory.  

sarah: Right, setting aside the question as to what extent Republican politicians buy the “Big Lie,” it is pervasive among Republican voters: In a March 30-31 Reuters poll, 6 in 10 Republicans said they still believed the election “was stolen” from Trump “due to widespread voter fraud.”

nrakich: And rank-and-file Republicans are correspondingly willing to make voting harder in order to get their desired outcome. According to the Pew Research Center, only 28 percent of Republicans now say “everything possible should be done to make it easy for every citizen to vote,” down from 48 percent in 2018.

alex: Republican politicians also seem to acknowledge that it’s likely they won’t win future elections without some sort of changes to the voting system. Sen. Lindsey Graham told Fox News that “mail-in balloting is a nightmare for us,” even though it wasn’t controversial before this past year. I think these changes are more about preserving power than about “voter fraud.”

And to Nathaniel’s earlier point, few Republicans lawmakers are doing anything to stop these bills from passing. Even the ones who don’t necessarily think there was fraud.

julia_azari (Julia Azari, political science professor at Marquette University and FiveThirtyEight contributor): The argument about election security boils down to an argument that people voted who shouldn’t have, right? That there were questionable votes. 

And so reforms based on the “Big Lie” hinge on the 2020 election having those kinds of irregularities. People might not come out and say it was because people of the wrong skin color voted — they might say, well, people should have been ineligible because of changes to early voting rules or whatever. But in the context of both the history of disenfranchisement of African Americans and more recent fears about people living in the country illegally voting, the implication is pretty clear. When the solution is to tighten up the voting rules, you have implied that the problem is the wrong people voting.

nrakich: Yeah, Julia, you see this in how surgically targeted some of these provisions are. For example, legislators in Georgia originally proposed banning early voting on Sundays, which would end the “Souls to the Polls” initiatives that are so popular at Black churches. That provision did not end up passing, but one that did — prohibiting food and water be handed to voters in line — will disproportionately affect urban areas, where there are both more lines and more voters of color.

alex: Myrna Pérez from the Brennan Center told us something similar, Julia. The bills we’re seeing now reflect “a real fear over the browning of America, and folks trying to protect what they have and keep the power for themselves.”

sarah: And as you all are saying, sometimes it’s hard to see that this is what these restrictions intend to do, because some of the more draconian measures don’t end up passing and the exact language of the measures that do pass isn’t quite so explicit (i.e., “This voting measure intends to disenfranchise Black Americans.”).

The New York Times’s Jamelle Bouie argued this in his essay on how it’s not an exaggeration to compare the current voting restriction push to the Jim Crow era. That is, a lot of the ramifications and larger purposes behind these bills weren’t immediately clear until all the pieces fell into line. “[T]he thing about Jim Crow is that it wasn’t ‘Jim Crow’ until, one day, it was,” writes Bouie.

At this point, though, do Republicans need the “Big Lie” to push through this agenda? 

That is, it feels like there is a shift at play here with Republicans increasingly distancing themselves from the election being stolen in 2020 and more so focusing on scoring points against how Democrats are now characterizing the laws (i.e., Jim Crow 2.0).

In fact, we’ve already seen some of this reframing in how Republican politicians criticized Major League Baseball’s decision to pull its All-Star Game out of Georgia over the new voting law, with Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell warning CEOs to “stay out of politics.”

What’s Republicans’ long-term strategy? 

nrakich: Many of the new arguments that Republicans are pushing are in bad faith, though. For example, Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp has claimed that Georgia’s new law actually expands voting rights because it allows for more early voting. But that completely ignores the many more objective restrictions in the law, such as less time to request an absentee ballot and the need for absentee voters to provide voter ID — not to mention arguably the most concerning part of the law, the part that gives the state elections board the ability to remove local election officials.

alex: I agree. Republicans’ motivation, long term, seems to be anti-democratic. Even Trump dismissed proposals to make voting easier last year. So now the post-Trump strategy seems to be focused on how best to win elections, and even though Republicans have maybe not explicitly said they don’t think they can do that without overhauling the current system(s) in place, that seems to be what’s happening.

nrakich: McConnell’s request for corporations to “stay out of politics” is also pretty funny — he sounds like Bernie Sanders! What McConnell means, of course, is that he wants corporations to stop disagreeing with him politically. (Corporations have been intimately involved in politics for hundreds of years.)

sarah: It is a difficult position for a party that is traditionally pro-business to adopt this stance, too.

nrakich: Exactly, Sarah; it’s disingenuous. Republicans have historically wanted corporations to be more involved in politics — e.g., when they’ve defended corporations’ right to give money to political campaigns.

julia_azari: I mean, part of the founding ethos of the Republican Party was about creating a strong national economy based on free (as opposed to slave) labor. Nineteenth-century Republicans saw the purpose of government as being able to help American business grow strong.

So I read McConnell’s statement as “stay out of politics that challenge existing power arrangements.”

alex: Isn’t Republicans’ argument with MLB, though, that it’s overstating what Georgia’s law does?

nrakich: What do you mean, Alex?

alex: Maybe my Texas bias is showing, but Gov. Greg Abbott said yesterday that he wouldn’t throw out the first pitch at the Texas Rangers’ home opener after MLB adopted “what has turned out to be a false narrative about Georgia’s election law reforms.” (That’s straight from his statement.)

sarah: Right, Republicans are now attacking Democrats for overplaying their hand in how they’re describing what the laws actually do. But Nathaniel hit on this earlier — while there might technically be a longer early voting period in Georgia now, there is less time to request an absentee ballot and it’s harder to cast an absentee ballot because a voter must provide voter ID.

julia_azari: The inconsistency of the arguments the GOP has been using to defend their position is wild.

nrakich: Yes, Julia, it’s so bizarre! If you truly believe that “voting shouldn’t be easy” is a defensible position, you should make that argument (e.g., on security grounds). 

But instead many Republicans are insisting that they are the party expanding voting rights, which suggests that they agree with the premise that restricting voting is the wrong side of the debate to be on.  

julia_azari: I think this reveals a key asymmetry (or at least a potential one). Democrats can overplay their hand by stoking outrage in their supporters and end up being lambasted for being wrong or exaggerating. Republicans, on the other hand, don’t seem to suffer repercussions for changing up the logic of their arguments; instead, they seem to have found a strategy in attacking “cancel culture” whenever under scrutiny.

sarah: What’s also so hard to disentangle in laws like Georgia’s is there are really two things happening at once. First, there are actual changes to the voting process, but then there are also changes that affect how elections are administered, and in the case of Georgia, make it easier for politicians to interfere. 

Nathaniel mentioned it earlier, but take the part of Georgia’s law that now allows the Republican-appointed state elections board to remove local election officials and essentially remove the secretary of state’s role in ensuring the election was conducted fairly.

We know that in the 2020 presidential election, Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger refused to kowtow to Trump’s demand that he find “11,780 votes,” but now that guardrail is gone.

A lot of what we’re talking about here is moot, though, if Democrats are able to push through their sweeping voting reform bill, H.R.1.

julia_azari: I’m on team “nothing else matters” once we’ve passed a certain anti-democratic threshold. And the provisions on election administration in Georgia’s law are worthy of a lot of attention — even if it’s not clear what they’ll mean in practice. 

The period between the 2020 election and the inauguration featured a lot of attempts to mess with the Electoral College votes. There was real drama over certification in Michigan, for instance. You’re seeing a move — even if it’s slight — toward the direction that people shouldn’t actually get to choose their slate of electors or that state legislatures can have a stronger hand in that process. This is like early 19th century stuff.

sarah: Is voting rights something Americans care about, though?

alex: Considering this is something some people fought for the right to do for decades, I’d say yes. Others might have a different answer, though, because not everyone votes.

nrakich: Historically, voting rights hasn’t been an issue that has motivated many voters; it barely cracks the list of the most important problems facing the country, per Gallup polling. It’s hard to get people worked up about wonky provisions like whether people should be able to register to vote on Election Day or sometime before, or whether there should be one week of early voting versus two. 

But I think framing these wonky issues as questions of rights and the health of our democracy has the potential to be very motivating. Especially if some voters (i.e., people of color) feel that their rights are being abridged.

alex: And I think that’s what Democrats have been doing so far: framing what’s happening in Georgia and other states as a “Jim Crow 2.0.”

That’s also probably easier to understand — and more motivating — than explaining the nitty-gritty measures in each individual bill.

nrakich: Look at what happened in North Dakota in 2018. The state passed a law that required voter IDs with residential addresses on them — something many Native Americans who live on reservations didn’t have. But the law appears to have backfired; Native Americans were highly motivated to exercise their right to vote in spite of the law, and Native American turnout skyrocketed.

julia_azari: Yeah, this is a pretty well-documented phenomenon. I want to make sure we clarify, though, that we are using this as an illustration of how important voting rights are to people, and not in the sense of “these laws are OK because there’s always countermobilization!” The latter caused so much angst on Twitter over the weekend in response to The New York Times’s Nate Cohn’s analysis of Georgia’s law.

alex: I’m torn on the countermobilization argument, because I’ve seen the same logic used to talk about Black voters (i.e., efforts to make it harder to vote will motivate more people and backfire against Republicans). But people shouldn’t have to surmount unconstitutional hurdles to vote!

I’m not saying you’re making that argument, Nathaniel, I’m just saying I’ve seen a few people argue that voter suppression isn’t real because a turnout gap didn’t/doesn’t materialize as expected.

nrakich: Agreed 100 percent, with both you and Julia. Even if a law doesn’t deter a single person from voting, it might still be restrictive if it imposes additional hardships on existing voters.

For example, even if people are willing to wait hours in line to make sure their vote gets cast, that inconvenience can have non-voting-related consequences, such as having to pay extra for child care or losing out on wages at your hourly job.

sarah: For sure, the most important thing is that people have the right to vote without it being a burden. But I also want to return to this question of electoral impact, because the research is really mixed on it. 

Some studies have suggested that absentee voting didn’t help Democrats’ margin in 2020, or as Cohn’s analysis of Georgia’s law suggests — it’s really hard to know whether this will impact turnout negatively in elections moving forward. But something we found in the research for our 2020 forecast was that if we account for changes in how easy it is to vote in each state based on a cost of voting index researchers have put together, states with higher barriers to voting tend to produce better results for Republican candidates while states with fewer barriers tend to lean more toward Democrats.

nrakich: I think a lot of nuance is called for when attempting to answer this question of electoral impacts. Discussions like these often lump different types of voting restrictions (or expansions) together, but not every voting reform is created equal. 

For instance, I am persuaded by the studies that show that changes to absentee voting laws are unlikely to change the outcome of an election. But political scientists have found that things like banning/instituting same-day voter registration actually can have significant effects! This thread from political scientist Charlotte Hill was very instructive in that regard:

The idea that making voting easier *won't* improve turnout is one of political science's worst takes. (And to be clear, many political scientists don't buy it.) In this thread, I'll explain why. Buckle up. https://t.co/NH1HH0YYuZ

— Charlotte Hill (@hill_charlotte) April 3, 2021

sarah: It also seems as if making voting easier is becoming an increasingly polarized issue, with far more Republicans now unwilling to say that “everything possible” should be done to make voting easier.

julia_azari: Yeah, on the question of polarization, this debate isn’t necessarily always going to be directly related to which laws help which parties, but rather how voters understand those laws in relation to their own partisan motivations — what they dislike about the other party, how their own identity motivates their partisanship. 

This thread from political psychologist Christopher Federico linking support for restrictions to racial attitudes is also useful.

Been digging into the new 2020 ANES release this week, and I got curious as to what might predict negative attitudes toward increasing ballot access. So, I took a look at the ANES items on early voting, voter ID, and felon disenfranchisement. (1/n)

— Christopher Federico (@ChrisPolPsych) April 2, 2021

sarah: Where do you all think the fight over voting rights heads next?

alex: Whether Democrats can actually agree on something and get H.R. 1 passed is a big open question. But there’s also how many of these restrictive bills actually pass and where that leaves Republicans two years down the line. 

If Republicans only pass a few dozen of these bills, do they continue pushing for them in future legislative sessions? (I would bet the answer is yes, but I’m curious to see how this progresses over time.)

julia_azari: A couple of questions I have been thinking about: One is the degree to which Trumpism within the Republican Party is about winning elections without winning majorities of the multiethnic electorate, and another is where standard political hardball ends and being anti-democratic begins. 

And at the risk of sounding stupid because I know these things are so intertwined at this point, I also wonder how to think about what’s about partisanship versus what’s about race. A really cynical take would suggest that elite Republicans are taking advantage of the salience of these demographic issues in order to produce institutional changes to consolidate power.

nrakich: I just think voting rights is an extremely nuanced issue that requires people to acknowledge a ton of realities all at once.

Some voting restrictions probably don’t affect turnout or who wins.

But others might.

But backlash/countereffects can scramble that calculus too.

But electoral impacts are only one small part of why these laws matter.

They matter in how they affect the convenience of voting too.

Regardless of impact, intent is important (e.g., it matters that Republicans are pushing voting restrictions shortly after losing a major election and crying “voter fraud” about it).

It matters normatively that it has become the position of one of the two main political parties that it should be harder to vote.

Regardless of impact, context is important (e.g., this is not the first time that a state like Georgia has tried to make it hard for certain people to vote).

It’s important to acknowledge the racial impacts/motivations of these laws.

“Voting restrictions” (or “voting expansions”) is an extremely broad term that encompasses a ton of more specific proposals, which should probably be judged on their own merits because they each have different impacts and are just or unjust to varying degrees.

[ohshcscenerios]

Find Me

Chapter Nineteen - Choose Your Own Adventure

Previous Poll Result: Read the paper

The drive back to the Ootori mansion was painfully silent. No one dared to speak, not when they couldn’t conjure the right words to express their grief. Words were lost to them. Nothing said could calm the burning anguish quietly ravaging them. The loss of their friend would take a life time to heal from; forever an open wound needing compassionate understanding. 

This evening would forever be stained with blood. 

Kyoya fixed his gaze outside the dark window and watched the treeline silhouette against a starry sky. The dark scenery was soothing on his teary eyes. He had pulled out the folded paper but didn’t open it yet. Instead he thumbed the slick paper absentmindedly. 

Tamaki used his jacket sleeve to wipe his eyes and glanced to Kyoya, noticing he hadn’t opened the folded paper yet. 

“Kyoya, when are you going to read that?” He asked quietly. Since they drove away from the cursed scene he had been watching Kyoya fiddle with the paper undecisively. Tamaki was heartbroken, wretched with sorrow, but he was also curious as to what remained secret. 

Ritsu had said it might involve Haruhi. If they could somehow save her from Kaoru’s terrible fate then they needed to act quickly. 

Kyoya looked down at the paper and quietly took a deep breath, “What if she’s dead.” He said defeatedly without looking away from his hands. “They murdered her father. They murdered Kaoru-” His friend’s name nearly caught in his throat, choking his sad voice.

Tamaki twisted in his seat to face his friend, “You can’t think like that. You spoke to her yesterday. She was alive yesterday.”

“So was Kaoru!” Kyoya barked back, not bothering to wipe the tears slipping from beneath his glasses. 

Mitsukuni turned around in his seat to address his friends inthe backseat, resting his forearm on the center console, “We know you’re scared Kyo-chan, and that’s alright. It’s okay to worry about the ones we love, but if Haru-chan is alive we have to do everything we can to find her. Right now that means reading that paper.” 

Tamaki gently touched Kyoya’s shoulder and nodded in agreement, “It might also tell us who murdered Kaoru. Come on, you can’t ignore this.” 

Kyoya knew they were right. Part of him was selfishly content with not knowing the truth hidden within the paper, able to live in ignorant bliss, but another part of him - a stronger part - demanded justice. The truth would be painful and although he wasn’t sure if he could handle anymore blows he needed to be strong. 

This was no longer just about Haruhi, as much as he hated to admit it. Now it involved them all. Their lives were now in question.

Kyoya slowly unfolded the paper and took out his cellphone to use as a light. The writing inside wasn’t necessarily writing but newspaper clippings glued together; a typical criminal touch. Unfortunately it did mask their identity well. Without handwriting to data-match they were once again at the mercy of their inscriptions. 

Thank you for your honorable sacrifice. Your death has commenced Japan’s purification. Those who cannot be sacrificed must serve a different purpose, one to profit Japan. Thankfully you didn’t suffer such fate. Sleep well and know you have been spared.

Kyoya read the message twice over before he succumbed to his anger, crushing the paper in his fist. Tamaki read over his shoulder but remained silent, wracking his mind to make sense of the printed nonsense. 

Kyoya darkly chuckled, “They said Kaoru was spared. His death was more in mercy than what they had in store for him.” He lightly shook his head as the corners of his lips perked up, unable to believe the evil he had just read. 

Mitsukuni tightened his fist as his eyes shadowed over, “His death was considered a mercy...?”

Kyoya nodded as his dark smile turned into a deep frown, “Those bastards.” He crumbled up the paper and viciously threw it down at his feet. “Those bastards!” 

Tamaki had to wrap his arms around Kyoya’s body to keep him still. Kyoya fought against him, demanding to be let go, but after a violent moment he finally settled down and allowed his friend to hold him. Salty tears streaked their flushed cheeks. They knew the paper wouldn’t be easy to read but they weren’t expecting this. 

After a long moment of sniffling silence Takashi finally spoke, “If they considered Kaoru’s death as mercy then what do they have planned for Haruhi?”

Kyoya’s eyes widened in horror at his friend’s words. If killing Kaoru was considered kind in comparison to what they’ve planned for others, what did that mean for Haruhi? Kyoya prayed for Haruhi to be spared their deadly motives but he never thought to question why they were keeping her alive.

He didn’t want to think of the sinister possibilities, not right now. His mental health couldn’t handle it. He was nearing his wit’s end as it was. He needed to calm down before he could revisit this train of thought. 

Takashi looked in the rear view mirror suspiciously, narrowing his eyes at something behind them. Mitsukuni noticed the change in his cousin’s demeanor and asked, “What’s wrong Takashi?” 

Takashi nodded towards something behind them, “Since we’ve entered downtown Tokyo two cars seem to be following us.” 

Tamaki was about to look behind him when Mitsukuni scolded, “Don’t look back. Don’t let them know we noticed them.”

Tamaki nodded and turned to face forward. 

Kyoya gritted his teeth and rubbed his throbbing right temple, “Are you sure they’re following us?”

Takashi nodded, “I took an unnecessary route back to your mansion and even drove through an alleyway. They’re following us.”

He cautiously watched the road ahead while checking the rear view mirror. He purposely twisted throughout downtown Tokyo to see if they’d follow and sure enough, they did. He had to keep a straight route now or else they’d figure out he was testing him. 

He checked the mirror again and saw one of the cars were picking up speed, quickly catching up to them. Takashi took a deep breath and remained calm, trying not to show any signs of alarm. If they continued to appear unaware it would benefit them until the last critical moment. 

The first car pulled up beside them in the other lane and kept pace with them. Kyoya curiously watched them through his window. There was no doubt whoever drove the other car was with the kidnappers but why they were driving alongside them didn’t make sense. 

The car’s back window slowly rolled down and Kyoya watched in horror as something metallic pointed at him.

“They’re going to shoot!”

CHOOSE NOW! (Click to Vote)

I’m sorry this update is so late. I caught up on a lot of sleep today and slept most of the day. 

Next update should be around 11:00am (ETS). Poll will end on hour prior.

[elizabeth-234]

The Hourglass

Previous Chapter Ten: For the Great Good Part Two

Hi All. Thank you for reading. This is for prompt ten of whumptober: Internal Bleeding and blood loss.

References to suicide.

Chapter Eleven: Where in the World is Peter? 

???

People were talking around him. They were the type of murmurs you could never hear the exact wording no matter how hard you concentrated. His head lay heavy on the pillow, sunk into the dent worn in it by time. He found the same experience with his limbs. They were all but useless at his side besides the small twitch in the ring finger of his left hand.

Time held no meaning in that state of immobility and exhaustion dragged him back to sleep whenever consciousness creeped back in. Inside the immobile body his cells worked to heal and repair the damage from the attack and fall, though his mind remained unaware. Hours or weeks could have passed, and in some ways they did but Peter wasn’t aware to the consequences of this yet.

He woke up to the sound of voices again. Shaking from the effort, he cracked an eye open. There was a young nurse sitting on a stool near the door. She was on some talking into type of boxed hospital phone. Her intonation rose and fell as skimmed through some paperwork on a clipboard. Peter closed his eyes and panted while trying to ignore the trembling in his neck. He slept again.

Waking moments were more prevalent from then on. He noticed someone was always stationed in his room no matter the time of day. Some stayed in the chair by the door while others came in and watched TV. They sat in the chair beside him and though he would fall asleep, it this strange state of sickness seem less lonely.

The doctor came sparingly but they made sure to give a progress report when they did. “Low urine output still. Give him more fluids” The doctor said much to Peter’s embarrassment. His palms were clammy against the bedsheets but his arms wouldn’t respond to his attempts to move. His mind wanted to claim health, that he was fine and could go back, but his body knew what his mind wouldn’t acknowledge: Peter was hurt and it was taking too long to heal. His heart was beating fast but his pulse pressure remained low. He wasn’t just tired but had full exhaustion and fatigue in his muscles.

Sometimes he pretended they were talking about somebody else so he didn’t have to be embarrassed. Like he wasn’t invisible and they weren’t talking around him. Other times he couldn’t follow the updates from the people. He’d get lost in the numbers and vocabulary, the twisting sentences that almost seemed like they contradicted themselves. A headache formed and he would block out the sounds instead of trying to wake up. Still, Peter slept on.

When he opened his eyes without strain and forethought, it was night. He stared at the moon from his spot on the bed. It hung low and thick in his window. The yellow and dark watercolors of the face casting a strange tint across the room and the blankets covering him. The face stared right back at him all dark eyes and long mouths. Did the man in the moon pity him or was he laughing?

Peter took a mental stock of himself. He tensed his muscles pushing them to see how they functioned after no use. He was breathing hard from his exploration, his legs twitching and restless. With slow, measured movements Peter pushed himself to sit, though his stomach muscles protested the whole way. Hunched over and catching his breath, Peter thought about his next options.

The memories of how he came to be in the hospital were gone, but he knew he had to get out. The more time spent here, the easier it was for the men to come back. They would fine him eventually and such public exposure would work against him. Peter almost caved against the onset of his plans and fell back onto the bed, but he held firm. Rhodey and Tony’s faces appeared before him like apparitions in a ghost story. Their transparent expressions yelling at him to run as invisible enemies attacked them. A branch in the tree outside moved with the wind, disturbing the shadows in his room, and they were gone. He would find a way out for them.

Peter swung his legs off the side of the bed. He gasped as the cold of the tiled floor soaked through his socks and chilled his feet. Some plastic pouch was strapped to his leg. He palpated it and blushed when he felt liquid inside. Pushing away thoughts of his urinary track, Peter tested his balance. He fully placed his feet on the ground and pushed away from the stationary structure of the bed. Back and forth he teetered on the balls of his feet before what felt like the first time in forever, Peter was standing on his own two feet. His muscles burned and shook from the effort, and Peter began sweating but he was standing. It seemed like a time ago he was running on the dock. Had he fallen into the pond? His head pounded. He couldn’t remember what happened next.

Something moved and he saw the heat rustle the papers of the nurse sitting by his door. Her head was bent over to rest on the wall. She was almost asleep. Her eyes kept closing and not even the sounds of Peter’s explorations woke her. He could sneak around her if he moved fast enough. He tried walking but something tugged him back. The IV poll moved forward to catch up with him leaving the metal to scrap on the floor. The nurse woke up with a snort.

“Oh my.” She said when she spotted him up standing. “You shouldn’t be up. Let’s get you settled back in.”

There was no room for argument and he was tucked back in before he knew it. He drooped into the bedding and despite hating to admit it, even to himself, Peter felt like he’d just ran a marathon. Escape stretched further away from him if standing caused this much of an energy drain. He stared at the nurse how was working around him. She was an older nurse, one he might have seen before in one of his brief instances of clarity. She refilled his water and tucked the covers over his shoulders. Before she could move away he stopped her.

“Miss?” He said wanting to ask something that had been bothering him all night. “I’ve been to the hospital a few times when I was a kid and never had someone sit with me. Not that I don’t appreciate it but I don’t think I can sleep knowing someone’s watching me.”



She gave him a critical eye as she checked the IV measurements with the time.

“Well, Mr. Parker that hasn’t stopped you from sleeping in the past 24 hours with other nurses here. I’m acting as a sitter tonight. I’m here to make sure you’re not a danger to yourself given how they recovered you from that lake.”

She patted him on his arm and his mind reeled with startling clarity of her words. They thought he jumped.  They thought he chose to jump into the icy waters and not come back. A shiver ran down his spine. He needed to make her understand.

“That, that wasn’t it. I - someone was running after me and I fell. I - it wasn’t on purpose.” 



She clucked her teeth and pushed the covers up where they had fallen when he tried to get up to reassure her and maybe himself as well.

“Be that as it may, Mr. Parker. I have a job to do until you are cleared with the doctors and you do too. Rest easy tonight and focus on getting better. You’ve had some internal bleeding that they need to look at now you’re awake.”

He nodded and fell back into his pillow all fight and plans of escape forgotten.

“It’s Peter, please. Could you put the TV on? I would feel better with some background noise.” He said.

“I’m nurse Bee. Sleep well, Peter. I’ll be watching over you tonight.”

He closed his eyes and the sounds from the TV filtered into the room. His last thought was he thought he heard a commercial with Shrek come on.

-

“You’ve got some very unusual markers in your blood, Mr. Parker. It’s the reason it took us so long to find a suitable donor to get a transfusion. Now that it’s all set you should be feeling much better. We’ve removed the catheter as well and stopped most of the pain meds. The goal is to get you mobile now, build up any muscles, and, of course, you’ll have to see a psychiatrist. One will be sent up this afternoon. CPS was called and-”

“I’m eighteen, Doc” He said maintaining eye contact. The doctor raised an eyebrow but Peter didn’t move a muscle. He didn’t believe Peter, never mind that he was right not to trust him. It was that or he didn’t care either way. “Plus, I’ll call my uncle and he’ll tell you. There’s no need for anything else.”

The afternoon was filled with appointments. Just thinking about it left him a state of denial. Question after question bombarded him. He was scanned and poked and prodded. He didn’t even know how he was going to pay for everything.

The talk with the therapist was the worst. The hour dragged on. Every question was followed by another. Peter tried to be as honest as possible. Sticking to the truth was best in a lie and it would be easier to remember later, but Spiderman, that place, and May. No, all of those things were off limits. What he did repeat was he hadn’t jumped. He was chased and fell. The man nodded and wrote down something in his notebook before trying to dive into Peter’s past. He had no past here.

In any other circumstances it might’ve been helpful. If Peter was open to the experience he might have found talking about his life to a stranger freeing. But this wasn’t the case. His past was gone here to all outside eyes. It hadn’t happened because it would be dangerous to talk about it. He was increasingly closed off as the minutes went by. His attention more focused on the plaid sweater vest the man was wearing than their session.

Night came again. They must have believed his story because was finally alone. He was parched from retelling everything he remembered and more during the day. Still, something was missing. Dr. Lang suggested it was the trauma but Peter thought everything seemed off somehow. Everything was different from before.

He stuffed the blanket around his feet so the cold air wouldn’t chill them and grabbed the controller. He almost wished the nurse from the previous night was there before he stopped the thought. Escape. He needed to escape tonight. The CPS had been too late to arrive today but he didn’t think he would be lucky enough tomorrow. They couldn’t make plans about him and take him farther away than he was now.

The IV prickled with blood after he pulled it out. He pressed the corner of his gown onto the small hole and once it coagulated, Peter tossed a blanket around his shoulders as disguise. It wasn’t the most incognito appearance but it was all he had until he could find something, maybe a nurse’s zip-up to use. He also didn’t want the cold to stress his body even more in its weakened state.

The memory of the therapist in plaid confirming his time with the CPS tomorrow was enough to get him out of bed and into the hallway. It was empty. Only his heart racing and machines talking were heard at this time of night. Above everything else, he couldn’t be caught. He walked without sound but he was too slow all his thoughts of daring escapes and only managed one hallway when he heard someone walking. A nurse turned the corner wheeling a cart in front of him. One of the wheels squeaked as it rolled. Peter held his breath and pushed himself into the wall but it wasn’t cover enough. As fast as he dared Peter darted into the closest room hoping the patient was asleep. He leaned against the door not breathing until the squeaking grew too faint to hear.

“What are you doing?”

Someone said from inside the room. Peter swallowed. His assessment of sleep was way off base. With a stolen breath he peered around the door wall and into the room.

Papers were strewn over a spread of open books on the bed. It was chaos but the person sitting didn’t seem to mind. They were hunched over one of the papers. Peter waited for them to look up. He wondered if his eyes would be cold or warm but they were shrouded from view. His brown hair longer than Peter’s haircut. It was grown out from his buzzcut but still not longer than his ears. Peter spared a glance at the boy’s mouth and forehead. Both were furrowed and lined as he concentrated.

Peter felt like he was in middle school again waiting in the principal’s office after getting into a fight when one of the other kids called him a nerd. The principal made him stand in front of his desk for five minutes while he finished work. Peter didn’t have time to wait now.

“Well?” He asked again with a raised eyebrow. Peter realized he’d never answered. While the ground seemed infinitely a safer place to look Peter forced himself to look up.

His breath froze in his chest. In front of him sat an apparition. Peter almost pinched himself to see if he was dreaming. His eyes were the same brown with flecks of black speckled throughout, but like the first time it was the emotion that kept his attention. There was a certain duality to his eyes. They stayed focused completely on him and taking in his face but this time there was no recognition of the distance between them. This time Peter felt as though he carried the ocean in him that separated them and, for a moment, he could almost understand the expression in his eyes the first time they met. Maybe he’d been asleep longer than he thought. Peter continued to stare and the longer he looked the more differences he spotted. The lines weren’t the same around his eyes, age hadn’t touched him yet, and he was missing that familiar edge to the brown pupils that had grown over the weeks of Peter being with them.

“I was just hiding - I mean, I was, Tony? What the hell are you doing here?” 



The man’s – boy’s - eyes hardened but the curiosity stayed.

“Who are you? And how do you know my name?” 


Thank you!

Next Chapter Twelve: The President, Shrek, and Sweater Vests 

[alessandriana]

Internet trolls don’t troll. Not the professionals at least. Professional trolls don’t go on social media to antagonize liberals or belittle conservatives. They are not narrow minded, drunk or angry. They don’t lack basic English language skills. They certainly aren’t “somebody sitting on their bed that weighs 400 pounds,” as the president once put it. Your stereotypical trolls do exist on social media, but the amateurs aren’t a threat to Western democracy.

Professional trolls, on the other hand, are the tip of the spear in the new digital, ideological battleground. To combat the threat they pose, we must first understand them — and take them seriously.

On August 22, 2019, @IamTyraJackson received almost 290,000 likes on Twitter for a single tweet. Put in perspective, the typical tweet President Trump sends to his 67 million followers gets about 100,000 likes. That viral tweet by @IamTyraJackson was innocent: an uplifting pair of images of former pro football player Warrick Dunn and a description of his inspiring charity work building houses for single mothers. For an anonymous account that had only existed for only a few months, “Tyra” knew her audience well. Warrick’s former coach, Tony Dungy, retweeted it, as did the rapper and producer Chuck D. Hundreds of thousands of real users viewed Tyra’s tweet and connected with its message. For “Tyra,” however, inspiring messages like this were a tool for a very different purpose.

The purpose of the Tyra account, we believe, was not to spread heartwarming messages to Americans. Rather, the tweet about Warrick Dunn was really a Trojan horse to gain followers in a larger plan by a foreign adversary. We think this because we believe @IamTyraJackson was an account operated by the successors to Russia’s Internet Research Agency (IRA). Special Counsel Robert Mueller indicted the IRA for waging a massive information war during the 2016 U.S. election. Since then, the IRA seems to have been subsumed into Russia’s Federal News Agency, but its work continues. In the case of @IamTyraJackson, the IRA’s goal was two-fold: Grow an audience in part through heartwarming, inspiring messages, and use that following to spread messages promoting division, distrust, and doubt.

We’ve spent the past two years studying online disinformation and building a deep understanding of Russia’s strategy, tactics, and impact. Working from data Twitter has publicly released, we’ve read Russian tweets until our eyes bled. Looking at a range of behavioral signals, we have begun to develop procedures to identify disinformation campaigns and have worked with Twitter to suspend accounts. In the process we’ve shared what we’ve learned with people making a difference, both in and out of government. We have experienced a range of emotions studying what the IRA has produced, from disgust at their overt racism to amusement at their sometimes self-reflective humor. Mostly, however, we’ve been impressed.

Professional trolls are good at their job. They have studied us. They understand how to harness our biases (and hashtags) for their own purposes. They know what pressure points to push and how best to drive us to distrust our neighbors. The professionals know you catch more flies with honey. They don’t go to social media looking for a fight; they go looking for new best friends. And they have found them.

Disinformation operations aren’t typically fake news or outright lies. Disinformation is most often simply spin. Spin is hard to spot and easy to believe, especially if you are already inclined to do so. While the rest of the world learned how to conduct a modern disinformation campaign from the Russians, it is from the world of public relations and advertising that the IRA learned their craft. To appreciate the influence and potential of Russian disinformation, we need to view them less as Boris and Natasha and more like Don Draper.

As good marketers, professional trolls manipulate our emotions subtly. In fall 2018, for example, a Russian account we identified called @PoliteMelanie re-crafted an old urban legend, tweeting: “My cousin is studying sociology in university. Last week she and her classmates polled over 1,000 conservative Christians. ‘What would you do if you discovered that your child was a homo sapiens?’ 55% said they would disown them and force them to leave their home.” This tweet, which suggested conservative Christians are not only homophobic but also ignorant, was subtle enough to not feel overtly hateful, but was also aimed directly at multiple cultural stress points, driving a wedge at the point where religiosity and ideology meet. The tweet was also wildly successful, receiving more than 90,000 retweets and nearly 300,000 likes.

This tweet didn’t seek to anger conservative Christians or to provoke Trump supporters. She wasn’t even talking to them. Melanie’s 20,000 followers, painstakingly built, weren’t from #MAGA America (Russia has other accounts targeting them). Rather, Melanie’s audience was made up of educated, urban, left-wing Americans harboring a touch of self-righteousness. She wasn’t selling her audience a candidate or a position — she was selling an emotion. Melanie was selling disgust. The Russians know that, in political warfare, disgust is a more powerful tool than anger. Anger drives people to the polls; disgust drives countries apart.

Accounts like @IamTyraJackson have continued @PoliteMelanie’s work. Professional disinformation isn’t spread by the account you disagree with — quite the opposite. Effective disinformation is embedded in an account you agree with. The professionals don’t push you away, they pull you toward them. While tweeting uplifting messages about Warrick Dunn’s real-life charity work, Tyra, and several accounts we associated with her, also distributed messages consistent with past Russian disinformation. Importantly, they highlighted issues of race and gender inequality. A tweet about Brock Turner’s Stanford rape case received 15,000 likes. Another about police targeting black citizens in Las Vegas was liked more than 100,000 times. Here is what makes disinformation so difficult to discuss: while these tweets point to valid issues of concern — issues that have been central to important social movements like Black Lives Matter and #MeToo — they are framed to serve Russia’s interests in undermining Americans’ trust in our institutions.

These accounts also harness the goodwill they’ve built by engaging in these communities for specific political ends. Consistent with past Russian activity, they attacked moderate politicians as a method of bolstering more polarizing candidates. Recently, Vice President Biden has been the most frequent target of this strategy, as seen in dozens of tweets such as, “Joe Biden is damaging Obama’s legacy with his racism and stupidity!” and “Joe Biden doesn’t deserve our votes!”

The quality of Russia’s work has been honed over several years and millions of social media posts. They have appeared on Instagram, Stitcher, Reddit, Google+, Tumblr, Medium, Vine, Meetup, and even Pokémon Go, demonstrating not only a nihilistic creativity, but also a ruthless efficiency in volume of production. The IRA has been called a “troll farm,” but they are undoubtedly a factory.

While persona like Melanie and Tyra were important to Russian efforts, they were ultimately just tools, interchangeable parts constructed for a specific audience. When shut down, they were quickly replaced by other free-to-create, anonymous accounts. The factory doesn’t stop. They attack issues from both sides, attempting to drive mainstream viewpoints in polar and extreme directions.

In a free society, we must accept that bad actors will try to take advantage of our openness. But we need to learn to question our own and others’ biases on social media. We need to teach — to individuals of all ages — that we shouldn’t simply believe or repost anonymous users because they used the same hashtag we did, and neither should we accuse them of being a Russian bot simply because we disagree with their perspective. We need to teach digital civility. It will not only weaken foreign efforts, but it will also help us better engage online with our neighbors, especially the ones we disagree with.

Russian disinformation is not just about President Trump or the 2016 presidential election. Did they work to get Trump elected? Yes, diligently. Our research has shown how Russia strategically employed social media to build support on the right for Trump and lower voter turnout on the left for Clinton. But the IRA was not created to collude with the Trump campaign. They existed well before Trump rode down that escalator and announced his candidacy, and we assume they will exist in some form well after he is gone. Russia’s goals are to further widen existing divisions in the American public and decrease our faith and trust in institutions that help maintain a strong democracy. If we focus only on the past or future, we will not be prepared for the present. It’s not about election 2016 or 2020.

The IRA generated more social media content in the year following the 2016 election than the year before it. They also moved their office into a bigger building with room to expand. Their work was never just about elections. Rather, the IRA encourages us to vilify our neighbor and amplify our differences because, if we grow incapable of compromising, there can be no meaningful democracy. Russia has dug in for a long campaign. So far, we’re helping them win.

[ciestessde]

Bored and Borrowed OR Why Hiyori Isn't Allowed...

“... takes place in the 80s/90s, anyway an era before smartphones where Hiyori gets a camcorder for her birthday or something and shenanigans ensue” - Anon ask on Tumblr

The longer you live with someone, the better you get to know them. When you live with each other for as long as the Visored had, you get to know one another a little too well. But, then… Everyone makes mistakes.

“...Hachi, what is this?” “It’s a camera!” “... And why did you get me this???” Hachi smiled brightly, “It’s to record our lives here in the World of the Living! With this, we can-” “Pass.” “... Uh…”

Hachi looked a bit put-out. He’d invested a lot of money in the complicated machine, with the hope that Hiyori would enjoy recording their time together. … In retrospect, perhaps this would have been a better gift for-- “May I use it, then?” asked Rojuro. “Knock yerself out,” Hiyori responded, tossing the heavy machine like it was a tennis ball. Rojuro caught it, set it on the table, and started reading the manual immediately.

“Oh… Ok, then. Whose gift is next?” Hachi moved on with Hiyori’s birthday celebration. At least someone was enjoying his gift…

Ignoring the goings-on around him, Rojuro studied the “camcorder” and decided the best way to use the machine -- would be for its original purpose. And once things had calmed down and he was able to get away: He set the scene, prepared his instrument, and hit record. … A few minutes later, and he had finished. He was about to remove the tape, but Mashiro interrupted him. “Hey, that’s that recording machine Hachi bought, isn’t it?” Rojuro nodded. “I’m done with it of you wanted to use it for something.” “Cool!”

Mashiro grabbed it, and started pressing buttons: she’d managed to take the tape out, detach the lense, and do a few other things that clearly weren’t suppose to happen -- before Love and Lisa interrupted. “I, uh… don’t think it’s supposed to do that,” Love whispered in Lisa’s ear. “Don’t worry,” she whispered back. “She hasn’t broken it, at least. I read all about these things earlier. We can’t have our plans ruined just ‘cause we don’t know what we’re doing!”

Sidling up to Mashiro, Lisa asked, in her most innocent voice, if she could borrow the camcorder for a while. Mashiro had started getting bored, anyway, so she handed it over. Grinning, the two conspirators ran off.

They’d planned to do these pranks for a while, but it took some extra setup to include the camera. They ended up having to recruit Shinji to be their cameraman. Unfortunately, they only managed to get through about three pranks (involving a classic water bucket drop, pretending to be yokai on a bridge, and appearing and disappearing items in a store) before Kensei found out.

And he, uh… wasn’t happy.

“Do you have ANY IDEA how much that thing COST?!” Lisa and Love shrank back onto the couch. Shinji just continued leaning back with his eyes closed; he almost looked asleep. “Do you know how long it can record for?” Lisa answered, “Well, about an hour, unless you-” “Unless you REPLACE THE TAPE! And do you know how much that TAPE costs?!”

In the end, he confiscated it for “important events only.” Shinji, though, had other ideas; easily stealing it from where Kensei had “hidden” it, he set to work on a prank of his own… Hiyori -- and everyone else -- was sound asleep. But that wasn’t a guarantee he wouldn’t get caught. If he made even the slightest suspicious sound, they’d wake up. So being as quiet as he could…

Shinji grinned. It was perfect! Hitting record, Shinji rang the bell in his hand.

Everyone jumped to attention, triggering the wires around them, dumping the buckets, turning on the fans, and… well. Causing overall chaos. All of it captured on film.

Errr… It was. Until Hiyori noticed him recording them, charged him, knocked him into the camera, grabbed the camera -- and destroyed it. Utterly.

And that is why Hiyori is not allowed near technology.

~~~~~

If you liked this, please REBLOG!

AO3 version

OSWs Master List

{This is part of my “OneShot Wednesday” project - I’m trying to write a one-shot every week that other people have requested! Original Requests one week, and Fanfic Requests the next.

To vote for the next OSW, go to my Tumblr, Twitter, or Website to find the current poll!

While I will try to keep track of all the requests I receive regardless of how they’re sent, you should send Fanfic Requests through the pinned tweet on my Twitter, and Original Requests through either my email (CiestessDE@gmail.com) or my Patreon (if you’re a patron) if you want to make sure I see them.

Just about everything goes -- I’ll tell you if there’s a problem. But if you want to know more about how they work, you can read about Original OSWs here, and Fanfic OSWs here.

So please send me ALL the ideas!!! I will make sure to recognize whoever’s idea/request it was in the work – just ask if you want to remain anonymous.}

[gibsongirlselections]

Trump and the Troops: The Media’s Latest Self-Satisfied Grift

Watch how this is done: Joe Biden plans to resign after only one year in the White House, according to someone with direct knowledge of the Bidens’ plans.

A senior official at Northern Virginia Community College confirmed that Jill Biden reached out recently to see if she could resume teaching if her husband was elected—Dr. Biden famously taught there while her husband served as vice president and had befriended the official. The College immediately offered her a four-year cycle of classes. She wanted, however, to make only a one-year commitment. “We won’t be in Washington for the full term,” Biden reportedly explained. “Joe’ll stay in office for a year and work on some signature issues like cancer research, but Kamala will be doing the heavy lifting from day one. Joe will quietly resign and give her plenty of time to make the job her own. It’s set in stone I’m afraid. I wouldn’t let him run any other way given his health.”

I made that up. See how easy it is? Start with a known bias, that many people believe Joe Biden won’t serve his whole term. Play off the fear that he’s a Trojan Horse. Tell people what they already believe: Harris is selected, not elected. Include some truth (Dr. Jill Biden did teach at Northern Virginia Community College during the Obama administration). And then take advantage of the magic of anonymous sources.

This comes in the context of an article in The Atlantic by Jeff Goldberg, where anonymous sources claim the president disrespected America’s military. Goldberg’s piece was followed by former Russiagate FBI agent Peter Strzok telling another Atlantic writer that Trump is controlled by the Russians. Then came the return of Alexander Vindman (powered by an anonymous source, er, “whistleblower”) and excerpts from Bob Woodward’s book Rage claiming without details that Dan Coats and Jim Mattis planned “collective action” against the president.

Those are only a few recent examples. Amid a four year tantrum, the media has recklessly published anything anti-Trump without concern for truth, little better than the minor celebs who take to Twitter to announce #TrumpisaPedo. Journalism has become farce, its purpose not to inform but to advocate. Influence ops. Propaganda.

It’s worth making an example out of Goldberg’s article because of its exclusive use of anonymous sources in pursuit of advocacy, in this case, trying to chip away at Trump’s pro-military base. Though Goldberg talks about events from as long as four years ago, the actual article was released alongside a Military Times poll showing Biden gaining some support among service members, and dovetailed with fuzzy reporting that Trump ignored Russian bounties on Americans in Afghanistan.

The questions of timing and motive make the validity of the sources ever more important. How do we know Goldberg didn’t make things up, or at least allow himself to be used for a partisan end as he did in advocating for the whole false narrative of WMDs in Iraq? Unless you’re Goldberg’s mother or the town mayor from Jaws, credibility comes from sources, not a writer’s inner soul. Goldberg is lacking.

As a diplomat, I staffed overseas presidential visits from Reagan to Obama. I sat in on planning meetings and got a pretty close-up view of the Secret Service. The president exists inside a series of bubbles, like Russian nesting dolls (forgive me). The innermost bubble, the one where someone might hear his personal thoughts, is reserved for very, very few people. The universe of those who could have been physically close enough to Trump (or any president) to overhear such sensitive remarks is tiny.

So if we know the names of the sources, it will be easy to place them in that special group, or not. It will be easy to check photos to see if they were where they would have needed to be to overhear. Fact-checkers could determine who else was around to confirm or deny the story (11 Trump officials deny it by name, zero confirm). Knowing the names resolves the risk. Trust but verify.

Goldberg’s sources say Trump remarked to former White House chief of staff and retired Marine General John Kelly, “I don’t get it. What was in it for them?” A real reporter would also provide context (Bob Woodward in Rage is also guilty of this, dropping a turd quote in the public punch bowl and then moving on), asking what was said before and after the damning remarks. It is not uncommon for civilians to respectfully inquire as to what motivates men to run into fires, to sacrifice themselves for a buddy, to stand in harm’s way.

Trump supposedly said this at the Arlington National Cemetery gravesite of Kelly’s son, a Marine killed in Afghanistan. This photo shows who was there—Kelly, two family members, Trump, and Pence. This would have been the moment when Trump would have made his remark, and those are the only five people on earth who would have heard it. Trump and Pence deny it; the Kelly family has been silent. The same photo set shows Trump meeting later with other Gold Star families, none of whom claim he made any disparaging remarks.

There is also a sniff test to be applied. The credibility of journalism should not depend on the reader’s biases; that’s the domain of late-night Trump Sucks You Guys comedy. Trump mocking Kelly’s son at graveside would be among the most horrible things anyone could do to a parent. Who would say such a thing? There is no record of the worst humans in history, men like Hitler, Stalin, and Pol Pot, saying such things. There is no record of concentration camp guards, men capable of killing children, saying such things. Would Kelly, a blooded Marine, stand silently with his family as accomplices in their humiliation, then release the information only years later while hiding behind the skirt of a journalist to score a glancing political point?

Though it got much less attention, The Atlantic followed up Goldberg with a piece that included a named source and allowed him to list out baseless accusations of treason. Former FBI agent Peter Strzok sees grassy knolls everywhere. The Atlantic helps him along, introducing a back-and-to-the-left theory by saying, “Despite multiple investigations by the FBI, Congress, and Mueller’s team, Americans have still never learned the full story about the Trump campaign’s relationship with Russia.” Like what?

Well, Strzok says he doesn’t really know, but it must be hidden in Trump’s taxes (which the IRS has reviewed for decades). The writer feels it in her ample gut, too, stating in her best Kevin Costner voice, “Strzok was getting too close to the truth.” Ah, from Strzok: “I do think the president is compromised, that he is unable to put the interests of our nation first, that he acts from hidden motives, because there is leverage over him, held specifically by the Russians but potentially others as well.” That is a straight-up accusation of treason.

And there both the writer and the source leave it, no specifics, no follow-up questions, not even a pee tape. We’re left to infer that They Are All In On It, everyone who could have blown this wide open is dummied up—FBI, CIA, NSA, DOJ. Remember Mr. X, the character in JFK played by Donald Sutherland? Strzok wants to be him. Problem is he’s not good enough for an Oliver Stone film, so he’s just out there pimping his book.

The Atlantic articles are sucked oranges. Writing this after the hot takes have faded, it’s clear they had little lasting effect and thus weren’t even decent propaganda. Goldberg’s article got far too much attention for how little it had to say. But it has not gotten enough review as a marker, the place we had to end up when the media wholeheartedly advocated for the Iraq war based on lies, literally rewrote history with the 1619 Project for political ends, buried things of concern with Hillary, helped create Russiagate, and used its own freedom of speech to quash dissenting voices as unpatriotic in 2003 and as “useful idiots” and Russian bots since.

In defense of what they call advocacy, crappy journalists often cite Walter Cronkite’s late opposition to the Vietnam War or Ed Murrow’s shaming of Joe McCarthy. Not only are such gold-standard examples rare enough that the list often ends there, they ignore the negative examples above. They also ignore how Cronkite’s and Murrow’s advocacy came at the end of dispassionate study and deep introspection. Cronkite and Murrow broke the objectivity wall not for a favored candidate, but over issues of deep national importance. And they understood the difference before acting.

Peter Van Buren, a 24-year State Department veteran, is the author of We Meant Well: How I Helped Lose the Battle for the Hearts and Minds of the Iraqi People, Hooper’s War: A Novel of WWII Japan, and Ghosts of Tom Joad: A Story of the 99 Percent.

The post Trump and the Troops: The Media’s Latest Self-Satisfied Grift appeared first on The American Conservative.

[jazzyyyjones]

Venezuela signal boost

I got most of this information from @fiftyonefics thank you so much Elisa.

UPDATE: Nicholas Maduro was proclaimed as one of the most bloody dictators in the world, and there were only three.

Yes, internationally, they have been recognized for the last week or so because of how intense it has all been. The U.S. Has taken action by freezing (or closing) the bank accounts from government ministers, and recently, the president’s. Basically, they all had these larges sums of money and no one knew where it all came from. 

The Venezuelan government is also well known in Venezuela for drugs. The nephews of the president’s wife, Cilia Flores, had been arrested because they were found with cocaine. However, months later, they were freed. They were freed because they were able to pay their way out of the incident. They are currently on vacation right now.  (EDIT: I just found out that they are actually still in prison. Apparently they weren’t liberated, but their family tried to do so.)

People were so upset with this that even children of known political figures (Nicolas Maduro’s supporters) were being called murderers because of the crimes that their parents have commited. Business men that worked close to the government were being called murderers and thieves as well. One was found in New York and was basically called out in a restaurant because of all the money he took, that could’ve been used on medicines.

My friend, Elisa, told me about one of her personal experiences. She said her grandma couldn’t get all of the medicine she needed for her diabetes. If she does happen to find something, it’s generic (not exactly what she needs), or very expensive. She also says that since food is so scarce (and expensive) there, she sometimes skips breakfast and sometimes only eats once a day so her family can have more food, especially her mom. Her mom had lost weight tremendously, causing her to get very sick. She has gained weight during the last three weeks.

The prices of basic things such as food, medicine, etc. are ridiculously high and you cannot find things that fit your basic needs. An example is something so simple and something that should be easy enough to get, like toothpaste, costs 30,000 Bs. Imagine if one tube of toothpaste was $30,000. The price of things changes constantly, because the price of the dollar changes daily. Right now, it’s 11,000 Bs. The minimum payment of an employee is 90,000 Bs.

Venezuela has the highest inflation in all of the world, with a projection of more than 1000% by the end of the year. But what does the government do? They print out more money, thus causing more inflation.

They started with protests around April (”we thought it was going to be like 2014 where they lasted a month” - @fiftyonefics ) People began to get tired and since they are a majority, protests began to get very intense and violent. According to here’s your guide to understand Protest Deaths in Venezuela  , more than 113 people have died since April of 2017. But these are the people who have been recognized by social media, there have been more deaths since then. 

Sure, maybe “they won” but don’t be fooled by what you read. They said that 8 million people voted which isn’t true either. Yesterday, the polling places were empty, and at 3pm only 1 million people voted (which is less than the 2%) I read that they used dead people’s information to gain more votes. 

At least ten countries don’t recognize this election. This election was a fraud election. Around 15 people were killed yesterday (two of them were teenagers. Aged 13 and 17.) 

Now, they said that 8 million people voted during this Constituent Assembly because during July 16th, a plebiscite was made, asking three questions which the answers were either yes or no:

1. Do you reject and ignore the realization of a Constituent Assembly proposed by Nicholas Maduro without the prior approval of the Venezuelan people? 2. Do you demand the National Armed Forces and all public officials to obey and defend the constitution of 1999 and support the decisions of the National Assembly? 3. Do you approve the renewal of public powers in accordance with the provisions of the Constitution, and the holding of free and transparent elections, as well as the formation of a Government of National Unity to restore constitutional order?

More than 7 million Venezuelans said yes to all of these questions. There are images and proof of this.

Nicholas Maduro is a killer, a torturer, and a liar. People are dying there. They don’t have the money to buy basic things like food, medicine, and other basic necessities. People are even eating from the garbage.

More on pervasive starvation in Venezuela

Venezuela: Priest Says ‘Preserve Food Waste’ to help ‘People who eat out of garbage cans’

These are some of the things that could happen, though we cannot confirm it will, in the next few days. 

1. Venezuela will be a communist country and will be under a complete dictatorship 2. The government will also have control over international media 3. Internet access will be regulated by the government or completely eliminated 4. The government will decide what and how much food your family will be allowed to consume.  4. The president, Nicholas Maduro, will stay in power until he dies or he chooses a successor. There will be no democracy or voting at all.  5. The government will take control of private properties. From businesses to your own home. They could even force you out of your home or make you share it with another family.  6. They will even be allowed to take your money and your bank accounts. No debit or credit cards are allowed. 7. You are not allowed to speak poorly of the government or the president. You could be charged with a few years in prison or even a death sentence.  8. No human rights. No freedom. 

UPDATE: These are some things the president has said so far on July 31st, 2017: 1. Threatened to jail politicians who oppose his ideas (basically the entire National Assembly) 2. Wants to Take over the department of justice that had been reformed recently. 3. Wants to take over some stores. 4. Also wants to close one of the most important TV channels in Venezuela.

Here are some links that can help you understand better: The photographer @federicoparra covers the situation with captions in English. Check out his page here

The US Embassy’s warning about traveling to Venezuela. Read that here

This Wikipedia article 2017 Venezuelan Protests

The purpose of this post is to inform. Please, do not reblog this post saying that it’s American propaganda or that this is bullshit because it is not. If you really want to verify any of this information, do a little research, and do not trust Venezuelan government’s sources because they are biased. Bring awareness to your politicians, wherever you are. Tell them to make a public stand against the constituent assembly, and instead support the national assembly that venezuelans elected back in 2015. This assembly was elected fairly. Without international recognition a governent is nothing.

#PrayforVenezuela #signalboost

[bountyofbeads]

That Uplifting Tweet You Just Shared? A Russian Troll Sent It

Here’s what Russia’s 2020 disinformation operations look like, according to two experts on social media and propaganda.

By DARREN Linvill & PATRICK Warren |

Published November 27, 2019 | Rolling Stone | Posted November 27, 2019 |

Internet trolls don’t troll. Not the professionals at least. Professional trolls don’t go on social media to antagonize liberals or belittle conservatives. They are not narrow minded, drunk or angry. They don’t lack basic English language skills. They certainly aren’t “somebody sitting on their bed that weighs 400 pounds,” as the president once put it. Your stereotypical trolls do exist on social media, but the amateurs aren’t a threat to Western democracy.

Professional trolls, on the other hand, are the tip of the spear in the new digital, ideological battleground. To combat the threat they pose, we must first understand them — and take them seriously.

On August 22, 2019, @IamTyraJackson received almost 290,000 likes on Twitter for a single tweet. Put in perspective, the typical tweet President Trump sends to his 67 million followers gets about 100,000 likes. That viral tweet by @IamTyraJackson was innocent: an uplifting pair of images of former pro football player Warrick Dunn and a description of his inspiring charity work building houses for single mothers. For an anonymous account that had only existed for only a few months, “Tyra” knew her audience well. Warrick’s former coach, Tony Dungy, retweeted it, as did the rapper and producer Chuck D. Hundreds of thousands of real users viewed Tyra’s tweet and connected with its message. For “Tyra,” however, inspiring messages like this were a tool for a very different purpose.

The purpose of the Tyra account, we believe, was not to spread heartwarming messages to Americans. Rather, the tweet about Warrick Dunn was really a Trojan horse to gain followers in a larger plan by a foreign adversary. We think this because we believe @IamTyraJackson was an account operated by the successors to Russia’s Internet Research Agency (IRA). Special Counsel Robert Mueller indicted the IRA for waging a massive information war during the 2016 U.S. election. Since then, the IRA seems to have been subsumed into Russia’s Federal News Agency, but its work continues. In the case of @IamTyraJackson, the IRA’s goal was two-fold: Grow an audience in part through heartwarming, inspiring messages, and use that following to spread messages promoting division, distrust, and doubt.

We’ve spent the past two years studying online disinformation and building a deep understanding of Russia’s strategy, tactics, and impact. Working from data Twitter has publicly released, we’ve read Russian tweets until our eyes bled. Looking at a range of behavioral signals, we have begun to develop procedures to identify disinformation campaigns and have worked with Twitter to suspend accounts. In the process we’ve shared what we’ve learned with people making a difference, both in and out of government. We have experienced a range of emotions studying what the IRA has produced, from disgust at their overt racism to amusement at their sometimes self-reflective humor. Mostly, however, we’ve been impressed.

Professional trolls are good at their job. They have studied us. They understand how to harness our biases (and hashtags) for their own purposes. They know what pressure points to push and how best to drive us to distrust our neighbors. The professionals know you catch more flies with honey. They don’t go to social media looking for a fight; they go looking for new best friends. And they have found them.

Disinformation operations aren’t typically fake news or outright lies. Disinformation is most often simply spin. Spin is hard to spot and easy to believe, especially if you are already inclined to do so. While the rest of the world learned how to conduct a modern disinformation campaign from the Russians, it is from the world of public relations and advertising that the IRA learned their craft. To appreciate the influence and potential of Russian disinformation, we need to view them less as Boris and Natasha and more like Don Draper.

As good marketers, professional trolls manipulate our emotions subtly. In fall 2018, for example, a Russian account we identified called @PoliteMelanie re-crafted an old urban legend, tweeting: “My cousin is studying sociology in university. Last week she and her classmates polled over 1,000 conservative Christians. ‘What would you do if you discovered that your child was a homo sapiens?’ 55% said they would disown them and force them to leave their home.” This tweet, which suggested conservative Christians are not only homophobic but also ignorant, was subtle enough to not feel overtly hateful, but was also aimed directly at multiple cultural stress points, driving a wedge at the point where religiosity and ideology meet. The tweet was also wildly successful, receiving more than 90,000 retweets and nearly 300,000 likes.

This tweet didn’t seek to anger conservative Christians or to provoke Trump supporters. She wasn’t even talking to them. Melanie’s 20,000 followers, painstakingly built, weren’t from #MAGA America (Russia has other accounts targeting them). Rather, Melanie’s audience was made up of educated, urban, left-wing Americans harboring a touch of self-righteousness. She wasn’t selling her audience a candidate or a position — she was selling an emotion. Melanie was selling disgust. The Russians know that, in political warfare, disgust is a more powerful tool than anger. Anger drives people to the polls; disgust drives countries apart.

Accounts like @IamTyraJackson have continued @PoliteMelanie’s work. Professional disinformation isn’t spread by the account you disagree with — quite the opposite. Effective disinformation is embedded in an account you agree with. The professionals don’t push you away, they pull you toward them. While tweeting uplifting messages about Warrick Dunn’s real-life charity work, Tyra, and several accounts we associated with her, also distributed messages consistent with past Russian disinformation. Importantly, they highlighted issues of race and gender inequality. A tweet about Brock Turner’s Stanford rape case received 15,000 likes. Another about police targeting black citizens in Las Vegas was liked more than 100,000 times. Here is what makes disinformation so difficult to discuss: while these tweets point to valid issues of concern — issues that have been central to important social movements like Black Lives Matter and #MeToo — they are framed to serve Russia’s interests in undermining Americans’ trust in our institutions.

These accounts also harness the goodwill they’ve built by engaging in these communities for specific political ends. Consistent with past Russian activity, they attacked moderate politicians as a method of bolstering more polarizing candidates. Recently, Vice President Biden has been the most frequent target of this strategy, as seen in dozens of tweets such as, “Joe Biden is damaging Obama’s legacy with his racism and stupidity!” and “Joe Biden doesn’t deserve our votes!”

The quality of Russia’s work has been honed over several years and millions of social media posts. They have appeared on Instagram, Stitcher, Reddit, Google+, Tumblr, Medium, Vine, Meetup, and even Pokémon Go, demonstrating not only a nihilistic creativity, but also a ruthless efficiency in volume of production. The IRA has been called a “troll farm,” but they are undoubtedly a factory.

While persona like Melanie and Tyra were important to Russian efforts, they were ultimately just tools, interchangeable parts constructed for a specific audience. When shut down, they were quickly replaced by other free-to-create, anonymous accounts. The factory doesn’t stop. They attack issues from both sides, attempting to drive mainstream viewpoints in polar and extreme directions.

In a free society, we must accept that bad actors will try to take advantage of our openness. But we need to learn to question our own and others’ biases on social media. We need to teach — to individuals of all ages — that we shouldn’t simply believe or repost anonymous users because they used the same hashtag we did, and neither should we accuse them of being a Russian bot simply because we disagree with their perspective. We need to teach digital civility. It will not only weaken foreign efforts, but it will also help us better engage online with our neighbors, especially the ones we disagree with.

Russian disinformation is not just about President Trump or the 2016 presidential election. Did they work to get Trump elected? Yes, diligently. Our research has shown how Russia strategically employed social media to build support on the right for Trump and lower voter turnout on the left for Clinton. But the IRA was not created to collude with the Trump campaign. They existed well before Trump rode down that escalator and announced his candidacy, and we assume they will exist in some form well after he is gone. Russia’s goals are to further widen existing divisions in the American public and decrease our faith and trust in institutions that help maintain a strong democracy. If we focus only on the past or future, we will not be prepared for the present. It’s not about election 2016 or 2020.

The IRA generated more social media content in the year following the 2016 election than the year before it. They also moved their office into a bigger building with room to expand. Their work was never just about elections. Rather, the IRA encourages us to vilify our neighbor and amplify our differences because, if we grow incapable of compromising, there can be no meaningful democracy. Russia has dug in for a long campaign. So far, we’re helping them win.

______

Darren Linvill is an associate professor of communication at Clemson. His work explores state-affiliated disinformation campaigns and the strategies and tactics employed on social media. Patrick Warren is an associate professor of economics at Clemson. Dr. Warren’s research focuses on the operation of organizations in the economy such as for-profit and non-profit firms, bureaucracies, political parties, armies, and propaganda bureaus.

[toxoplasmajuice]

Collins MMBC Replies 22

@jackssims​ replied to your photo “[Gretta]: (I wonder what last year’s seniors are up to these days… I...”

She plans on globe wide death and destruction Or, you know, she could write a song and perform it

a song ABOUT globe wide death and destruction

ignoring the fact that gretta has no musical talent

jackssims replied to your photo “[Cheyenne]: Hey, am I late?”

This bitch

episode summary

jackssims replied to your photo “[Missy]: You! Get out! [Cheyenne]: It’s dangerous out there! I almost...”

I'm with Missy on this

(: Death Threats Make You Just As Bad (:

jackssims replied to your photoset “-skip- … [Missy]: Farha?! [Farha]: M-Missy…”

NO

@cafesimming​ replied to your photoset “-skip- … [Missy]: Farha?! [Farha]: M-Missy…”

NOOOOO

IM SO SORRY THE DICE MADE ME

cafesimming replied to your photo “[Missy]: You’re alive! [Farha]: [cough] Missy– [Missy]: Ian! There...”

;n;

😭😭😭

cafesimming replied to your photo “¦ [hack] [Farha]: [SHRIEK] [Missy]: Shit–   [hack] [hack] [hack] ...”

oh my god

jackssims replied to your photo “¦ [hack] [Farha]: [SHRIEK] [Missy]: Shit– [hack] [hack] [hack] ...”

Oh no  😭

@cookiehorse​ replied to your photo “¦ [hack] [Farha]: [SHRIEK] [Missy]: Shit– [hack] [hack] [hack] ...”

BRUTAL

@avtvmnsalad​ replied to your photo “¦ [hack] [Farha]: [SHRIEK] [Missy]: Shit–   [hack] [hack] [hack] ...”

HOLY FUCK

see, the thing to remember here is that missy collins is not the most physically strong individual and that nobody in the sims 3 community has ever thought “hmm what if i made an accessory butcher knife” so the same knives i always use had to do

@asimlishpixel​ replied to your photo “¦ [hack] [Farha]: [SHRIEK] [Missy]: Shit–   [hack] [hack] [hack] ...”

the good thing is, i didn't need my heart anyways

i am So Sorry

borderlinedub replied to your photoset “[Cordelia]: Missy, I-I’m not the– I’m not– [Missy]: I know....”

WHAT WERE YOU GOING TO SAY RAFFERTY

probably just “i’m not the murderer” here

cafesimming replied to your photoset “[Asha]: So– So maybe I did do it! Maybe I am the murderer! But,...”

I KNEW IT!!!!!!!

congratulations on your Correct Votes

jackssims replied to your photoset “[Cordelia]: Missy, I-I’m not the– I’m not– [Missy]: I know....”

I REGRET MY VOTES

Fear Not! i actually tested in a sixty four file what would happen if cordelia got accused and asha got least voted in the last poll (put everyone in the file, set everyone’s LTR w/ missy to what it was in the actual file, ran accusation interactions on cordelia and least vote interactions on asha) to see if i had to plan the Bad End too and cordelia would’ve won either way

jackssims replied to your photoset “[Asha]: So– So maybe I did do it! Maybe I am the murderer! But,...”

GODDAMN IT ASHA WHAT IN THE FUCK

But, dammit, it’s not like she came in wanting to kill anyone!

@mercuryreblogs​ reblogged your photoset and added:

asha!!!

i...... am very, very sorry

jackssims replied to your photoset “[Cheyenne]: Hey, what’d I miss? [Missy]: Fuck off! [Asha]: [shrug] Got...”

DON'T LOOK SO AMUSED CHEYENNE

Don’t Be Too Cheery Cheyenne You Never Know What Could Happen

jackssims replied to your photo “[SLA [Missy]: gch– Get off– [Cheyenne]: You know I’m only using...”

FUCK OFF CHEYENNE MAY THE TRAGEDY CONSUME YOU WHOLE

i’d ask whether chey’s actual death counted but the fact that the “[SLAM]” in this post is rendered as just “[SLA” in the link is pissing me off like how does that even happen

jackssims replied to your photo “[Gretta]: [abruptly stops crying] I might’ve helped her motivation,...”

Then kill her Asha, we're waiting

shhhhhh it needs to be The Right Moment

jackssims replied to your photoset “[Cheyenne]: …Look, she just likes you better because you don’t really...”

Greta, Cheyenne has a point: you don't have a purpose Not saying I'm agreeing with Cheyenne in anyway, that's just a valid argument

yknow? if she was just doing this for funsies, that’d still be her purpose: funsies

borderlinedub replied to your photoset “[Cheyenne]: …Look, she just likes you better because you don’t really...”

I've just realized that Asha is incredibly nonchalant about all of this

this exact argument has probably gone down at least 5 times in group texts and asha was Sick Of It

borderlinedub replied to your photo “[Cheyenne]: Wha– hey!! [THUD]”

crack her skull open gretta

she could if she wanted to

jackssims replied to your photo “[Cheyenne]: Wha– hey!! [THUD]”

I'm rooting for Gretta in this fight tbh

if you weren’t, you’d be Fucked, seeing as gretta is much, much stronger than cheyenne

jackssims replied to your photoset “[Gretta]: ‘Cause I don’t think you want to challenge me to a fight,...”

Gretta is a Mastermind for one of the Killing Games confirmed

all im gonna say is ProjMutual is no one’s Summer Plans, it’s more of a winter thing canonically

jackssims replied to your photoset “[Gretta]: So, what, Cordelia’s the winner, then? Aw, man! But… my...”

OH MY GOD I JUST REALIZED HER TIE IS WHITE AND BLACK

I WAS HOPING SOMEONE NOTICED

jackssims replied to your photoset “[Gretta]: So, what, Cordelia’s the winner, then? Aw, man! But… my...”

Upon the re-read, I now see Gretta is talking about Camisade, and calm tf down Despair Girl

gretta is a huge mmbc fandom member and has written bad fanfic about mmbc contestants (and occasionally hosts)

(she’s fully aware her writing sucks, she continues writing bad mmbc fanfic for fun)

jackssims replied to your photoset “[Jasmyn]: Gretta, I don’t know where you’re going, I don’t know what...”

If Jasmyn dies in the next post I'm gonna scream

jackssims replied to your photoset

JASMYN ISN'T DEAD BUT I'M SCREAMING FOR DIFFERENT REASONS

:3c

jackssims replied to your photoset “[Gretta]: [putting backpack back on] But unfortunately, I still gotta...”

Deadass thought Gretta was going to shoot Jasmyn

WOULDN’T THAT BE SOMETHIN’

jackssims replied to your photo “[Gretta]: Alright, seriously gotta run now! Don’t be afraid to kill!...”

Gretta what kind of double negative advice is that

do do drugs, then

borderlinedub replied to your photoset “[Off-Screen Stranger]: Uh, hey! Excuse me, uh… do you need somewhere...”

bitter af

my plans had jasmyn looking more dazed & hopeless than angry but i Always have at least 1 pose where the expression is off in some way

borderlinedub replied to your photoset “[Asha]: TOUCH HER AND YOU’RE DEAD, CHEYENNE! [Missy]: Asha, what the...”

asha punts ian like a football. Punt

the Constant Throwing Each Other Around in this finale continues

jackssims replied to your photoset “[Asha]: TOUCH HER AND YOU’RE DEAD, CHEYENNE! [Missy]: Asha, what the...”

GIVE HER HELL ASHA

jackssims replied to your photoset “¦ … … … [Asha]: …I’m not trying to win at all anymore. I’ll go make...”

YESSS

Temporarily Rooting for the Murderer

jackssims replied to your photoset “[Asha]: [SHRIEK] [THUD] [thud] [thud] [thud] … [Missy]: Ian, we’ve...”

Damn Missy

cafesimming replied to your photoset “[Asha]: [SHRIEK] [THUD] [thud] [thud] [thud] … [Missy]: Ian, we’ve...”

WELL

avtvmnsalad replied to your photoset “[Asha]: [SHRIEK] [THUD] [thud] [thud] [thud] … [Missy]: Ian, we’ve...”

JESUS BYE

fun fact: missy being the one to kill the murderer was something i had planned since, like, 2015

jackssims replied to your photoset “[Missy]: –mmm– [sniff] fuck– [breaking into sobs] [Cordelia]: I-It’s…...”

My heart 💘🤚🏼

😢

cafesimming replied to your post “EPISODE END: “Loose Ends” (episode 22)”

this episode canonically happened on my birthday and im not sure how to feel about that

happy birthday u got.... whatever this was

avtvmnsalad replied to your photo “Collins BC Episode 22 - Loose Ends Farewell. -Ian”

HOOOOOOOOOOOGGGHIOI

It’s Time

avtvmnsalad replied to your photoset “[Missy]: Farha… Farha, I’m so fucking sorry… [Farha]: Don’t be…...”

jesus christ i'm crying in the club

i have caused two people to say this phrase because of this scene and i am So Sorry

avtvmnsalad replied to your photoset “[Missy]: [softly] Are you comfortable under here? Would you prefer...”

wtf i'm choked up

I AM SO SORRY

jackssims replied to your post “Tying Loose Ends”

I wanna ask about that bad end, but that's probably very upsetting if Ian is the only survivor

this reply is somewhat obsolete because i gave the bad end already but im replying anyway because completion

[sundayera7-blog]

2019 Cubs Heroes and Goats: Game 40

Heavy sigh. The Cubs lost last night. That hasn’t been happening very much the last month. Once again, when they did lose, the bullpen was under the microscope. To be fair, the Cubs had the lead late and then gave it up. No bullpen is going to be perfect, but two different Cubs relievers gave up homers in the same game and that’s going to draw attention. It wasn’t one pitcher that lead to the failure, it was multiple pitchers.

The Cubs bullpen isn’t great. But it has actually been pretty good. Brandon Kintzler, who allowed the first of the homers last night, has actually been very good. But he’s had a little bit of trouble with the long ball. For his career, 12.5% of his fly balls allowed have been homers. This year, that is all of the way up to 23.1%. Joe hasn’t really used Brandon in the highest leverage spots, so Kintzler appears to be being used about the way he would even if the Cubs had injured Pedro Strop and either injured Brandon Morrow or some other back end option. Despite the homer problems, Kintzler has a 2.29 ERA and a 4.07 FIP. There is no world in which he isn’t going to remain a part of this Cubs pen and he’s done well enough to justify the largely medium leverage spots that he’s been handed.

Carl Edwards Jr. allowed the other home run. Joe and the Cubs brass is giving Carl every opportunity to be the pitcher he can be. Carl was battling his control a bit last night from what I could see. Then he appeared to not want to give in and walk Eugenio Suarez and he ended up throwing a meatball that Suarez deposited somewhere around Jupiter. (Sadly, this was one of two at bats I saw in the whole game). Carl just hasn’t gotten it done this year. As a whole, the bullpen that was available to the Cubs just wasn’t adequate last night. Morrow has been out forever, so I don’t really consider that being down a man in the pen. However, Strop is out. Steve Cishek was down because of heavy recent usage. It appears that Brad Brach may have been the choice for the ninth inning of this one had there been a save opportunity.

You’ll spread your own frustration where you choose to. But I’ll make this point. Yes, the Cubs bullpen was inadequate last night due to pieces that weren’t available. And if this were October and that was the best the Cubs have to offer, I’d be pretty frustrated with the Cubs front office. Strop will return. Cishek would be available if this were a playoff game. Morrow may or may not make any impact once he actually returns to the field. But the Cubs are running a four month audition in the bullpen for who will actually be there when the Cubs do make it back to the playoffs. That’s when all of this will matter. Barring a striking turn of events, Carl Edwards Jr. wouldn’t be there if this were a playoff game. The Cubs front office (and every other good front office with adequate resources) adds relief pitchers every year at the trade deadline. This year will be no exception. With the way this team has played, very much like 2016, the Cubs will surely tap both their financial and their minor league resources to bring in at least one high end piece and possibly a mid level piece as well.

Also note this. The hitters available to the Cubs weren’t adequate. With Joe wanting Willson Contreras to get a full day off, there weren’t a good number of bats available either. Ben Zobrist remains on indefinite leave. Anthony Rizzo isn’t available. Daniel Descalso has been at least a little bit limited for almost two weeks. We saw this last year with the Cubs too. When they aren’t fully healthy, some of the players get exposed. For all of the offensive talent that the Cubs deploy, guys like Albert Almora Jr., Kyle Schwarber, Jason Heyward and Addison Russell, not to mention Zobrist and Descalso, are all better players when Joe has a full compliment of options and he can mix and match to try to optimize matchups.

So to make my point, I’m not angry that the bullpen was inadequate last night. I’m going to say that the whole team that was put on the field last night wasn’t adequate. They didn’t have enough weapons on either side of the ball. Yet, there they were leading 5-3 in the bottom of the eighth inning. They damn near won a fourth straight game with their worst starter, a lineup that was only a couple notches up from a split squad spring training game and a depleted bullpen. So you’ll pardon me while I’m not panicking in the streets. They lost a game. I suspect that’ll happen dozens more time this year. I’d certainly rather they were losing the ones when they were short handed than the ones where all hands were on deck and they just weren’t getting the job done.

With that, we turn our attention to yesterday’s game as we look at what WPA had to say about Heroes and Goats. As always the Heroes and Goats are determined by WPA (Win Probability Added — here’s a good explanation of how WPA works) and are not in any way subjective. Many days WPA will not tell the story of what happened, but often it can give at least a glimpse to who rose to the occasion in a high leverage moment or who didn’t get the job done in that moment. Also note, for the purposes of Heroes and Goats, we ignore the results of pitchers while they are batting and hitters while they are pitching. With that, we get to the results.

Game 40, May 15: Cubs 5 at Reds 6 (25-15)

THREE HEROES:

Superhero: Addison Russell (.218). Addison had his first really good night at the plate since being back. He had two hits including a two-run homer. He scored twice. Addison still has a very tiny 15 plate appearances since coming back, but he has a wRC+ of 148 to date. Don’t be surprised if he starts seeing a bit more frequent playing time.

Hero: Yu Darvish (.118). Yu should have been the story of this game, but it got lost in the bullpen collapse. He threw 5⅓ innings and allowed five hits, two runs and struck out 11. Importantly, he didn’t walk anyone. Even with this performance, he’s got a BB/9 of 7.07 which would be higher even than the worst rate of his career (last year at 4.73).

Sidekick: Kyle Schwarber (.115). Kyle had a solo homer and also drew a walk in four plate appearances. Kyle gets a lot of ire for his slow start to the season. Over 138 plate appearances he has a wRC+ of 93.

THREE GOATS:

Billy Goat: Carl Edwards Jr. (-.259). One inning pitched, one hit, one run, one strike out. He also allowed an inherited to score.

Goat: Brad Brach (-.225). Brach threw the ninth and then started the 10th. He threw a perfect ninth, but then allowed two walks (one intentional) and two singles (one would have surely been more than a single had it not been a walk off) while only recording one out in the 10th.

Kid: Willson Contreras (-.138). He pinch hit in the top of the 10th with a runner on first and two outs and grounded out to the pitcher.

WPA Play of the Game: Carl Edwards Jr. was summoned to face Eugenio Suarez with a runner on first and no outs in the eighth inning. The Cubs were leading 5-3. He allowed a moon shot home run. (.366) Carl already has two of the five largest negative WPA events of the Cubs season which is now one-quarter complete.

*Cubs Play of the Game: Addison Russell’s two-run homer in the second inning off of Reds starter Sonny Gray. (.203)

Cumulative Standings Top/Bottom 3:

Up Next: The Cubs will try to keep their consecutive series won streak going, but they’ll need a win against the Reds top pitcher to do it. The Reds will look for a second consecutive series win.

Jose Quintana gets the start for the Cubs. Jose is 4-2 with a 3.50 ERA in 46⅓ innings of work on the year. Last time out he was tagged with a loss against the Brewers. In that one he threw 6⅔ innings and allowed four hits, three walks and three runs. He struck out six. Q faced the Reds four times in 2018 and he was 2-2 and allowed eight runs in 22 innings. Just one year ago (5/19), he threw seven shutout innings allowing only one hit in Cincinnati. Current Reds have 147 plate appearances against Jose with a .757 OPS. Jose Iglesias has the most plate appearances at 27 (.630 OPS). One batter who has done well against Q is Joey Votto, who just loves Cubs pitching, (14 PA, 1.286 OPS). One batter who has struggled is Jose Peraza (14, .429).

The Reds send their young ace Luis Castillo to the hill. Luis is 4-1 with a 1.76 ERA in 56⅓ innings. Last time out, he threw six shutout innings in San Francisco, allowing only two hits and five walks. He struck out 11. He hasn’t been charged with a loss since his second start of the year way back on April 3 against the Brewers. Despite his strong performances on the year, the Reds are only 5-4 when he starts. Last year, Luis faced the Cubs five times and was 2-1 with a 4.74 ERA in 43⅔ innings. The 26-year-old right-hander has taken a giant step forward in his development though in 2019.

Castillo has allowed only a .410 OPS in 108 plate appearances to right handed hitters. He’s allowed a .597 OPS in 112 plate appearances to left handed hitters. Hopefully, Anthony Rizzo can return to the lineup tonight. That said, Anthony has the most plate appearances against Castillo. In 16 PA, he has just a .466 OPS. One Cub who has hit Castillo well is Daniel Descalso (12, 1.517). Kyle Schwarber also has two home runs in just nine PA against the young Reds ace.

This looks like a tough one. Hopefully the Cubs can stay just hot enough to squeak one out.

Poll

Who was the Cubs Player of the Game?

16%

Addison Russell

(6 votes)

78%

Yu Darvish

(29 votes)

2%

Kyle Schwarber

(1 vote)

0%

Albert Almora Jr.

(0 votes)

2%

Other

(1 vote)

37 votes total Vote Now

Source: https://www.bleedcubbieblue.com/2019/5/16/18627653/2019-cubs-heroes-and-goats-game-40

[takebackthedream]

SCOTUS Just Took Away Your Right to Vote. Did You Notice? by Jessica Juarez Scruggs

The Supreme Court just gave a green light to racist voter purges. Their 5-4 decision to allow Ohio to take any voter off the rolls who hasn’t voted in two years and doesn’t return a postcard mailed to their house hands a dangerous new tool to the enemies of democracy in America.

Granted, efforts to exclude the poor and people of color from voting – from only allowing white male property owners to vote, to poll taxes and night riders, are nothing new in the United States. But this Supreme Court decision will enable Ohio to disenfranchise thousands of voters every year, and other states are sure to follow.

This ruling by the court’s conservative majority with Neil Gorsuch, Trump’s newly minted Justice casting the deciding vote, comes despite the fact Congress explicitly protected all citizens’ right to vote – and not to vote – through the National Voter Registration Act (NVRA), which took effect in 1995.

The NVRA and its later amendments clearly ban states from punishing infrequent voters by removing them from lists of registered voters, in light of the historical exclusion of low-income and minority voters through such measures.

Voting-rights advocates took Ohio to court to challenge the state’s purges of voting rolls, citing the NVRA, and won in lower courts. Unfortunately, the Court’s conservative justices have now ruled that since Ohio only used lack of voting as evidence that the person had moved, not as a punishment, these purges are allowed.

So now, according to the highest court in our land, Ohio can lawfully strip its citizens of their right to vote because they forgot to return a single prepaid postcard.

Straining Reason

This ruling strained the patience of the Supreme Court’s more reasonable Justices. As Associate Justice Sonia Sotomayor noted in her blistering dissent,

The Court errs in ignoring this history and distorting the statutory text to arrive at a conclusion that not only is contrary to the plain language of the NVRA but also contradicts the essential purposes of the statute, ultimately sanctioning the very purging that Congress expressly sought to protect against.

Congress enacted the NVRA against the backdrop of substantial efforts by States to disenfranchise low-income and minority voters, including programs that purged eligible voters from registration lists because they failed to vote.

This latest ruling means thousands of Ohioans will lose their right to vote, without ever knowing they have lost until they show up the polls on Election Day and are turned away, told they are no longer on the rolls.

A Targeted Attack

In the runup to the 2016 elections, Ohio purged more than more than 200,000 voters. That’s more than the razor-thin national margin that handed Donald Trump the presidency. Six states already have similar, though less extreme, voter-purge laws on the books, and many more may now follow suit.

Ohio’s claim that it uses voting to find out who has moved not only defies logic, it obscures the true motives of their suppressing voters. This is not a simple matter of keeping voting rolls up to date: it is a targeted attack, which disproportionately – and intentionally – harms low-income communities and people of color.

As Justice Sotomayor went on to note in her dissent, since 2012 “African-American-majority neighborhoods in downtown Cincinnati had 10 percent of their voters removed due to inactivity,” while only 4 percent of voters were removed in a suburban, majority-white neighborhood.

For one, we already have a simple way to check if someone might have moved: the USPS’s national change of address service. In addition, there are many, many reasons besides moving that a voter might miss elections, including the responsibilities of work and childcare or simply not seeing anyone on the ballot worth voting for.

Undermining the Vote

In 2016, the single largest group of voters weren’t Trump supporters or Clinton supporters: they were non-voters. The U.S. Elections Project estimates 100 million eligible voters did not turn out to vote in the 2016 election. That’s nearly half of all who are eligible to vote.

As Duke University professor Nancy MacLean points out in Democracy In Chains, her excellent study of the Koch brothers’ decades-long campaign to undermine the institutions of American democracy, our country’s billionaire class has long known their agenda has no chance in a fair fight. So they have pulled every trick in the book to suppress the vote, including by stacking the courts – all the way up to the Supreme Court – in their favor.

A Pew Research Survey found non-voters in the U.S. are younger, poorer and less white than frequent voters. These same people are significantly more likely to back progressive ideas and candidates. In other words, they are exactly who we need to engage to take back our government.

Something To Vote For

This year, more women and people of color are running than ever before. Up and down the ballot, inspiring progressive candidates are stepping up and running boldly progressive campaigns.

So finally, in many states and races, we do have something worth voting for – but if we aren’t careful, that won’t be enough. As a movement, we must fight voter suppression in the courts, in legislation and in the streets.

No matter what the Supreme Court rules, we can – and must – turn back this latest wave of voter suppression by registering voters, knocking on doors, driving our neighbors to the polls and by showing every politician who resorts to racist trickery to keep people from the polls that we are prepared to use our right to vote before we lose it.

If we are ever to have the kind of government we need – a government that puts people and planet over profits, that ensures workers earn decent wages and can afford housing, healthcare and a good education, ends mass incarceration and puts justice back in our criminal justice system – it will take every vote, and every voter. Especially infrequent ones.

We have to fight to ensure all voices are heard, especially those silenced for too long.

[democratsunited-blog]

Republicans Lost Their Way Long Before Trump (But So Did the Democrats)

https://uniteddemocrats.net/?p=3400

Republicans Lost Their Way Long Before Trump (But So Did the Democrats)

There’s been a spate of articles about how Trump has “taken over” the Republican Party.  For example, New York Times columnist Charles Blow opened a recent column saying, “In one way, Donald Trump’s presidency has been a raging success: He stole a political party.” And former House Speaker John Bohner said, “There is no Republican Party. There’s a Trump party. The Republican Party is kind of taking a nap somewhere.”

The thing is, the Republican Party was taken over long ago, and Trump is merely the logical endpoint of that takeover. Moreover, the Democratic Party has also been taken over, and by the same cast of characters.

The fact that it took the election of a narcissistic reality show buffoon to get the media to acknowledge—albeit only reluctantly and tacitly—that the Republican Party is off the rails is one of the greatest stories never told. The fact that they think Trump is the one who did it is a sign of gross incompetence.

So is the media’s tendency to tiptoe around the Democratic Party’s sell out to the same suspects.

Both of these events are historic, important, and blatantly obvious. For the press to ignore them is tantamount to having two stark raving mad uncles hidden away in the national attic, screaming at the top of their lungs while we sit below, wondering why we can’t have a rational national conversation.

Let’s examine each, in turn.

The Republican Party and the Oligarch’s Coup

While rich plutocrats had attempted an actual coup back in the early stages of Roosevelt’s administration, the blueprint for a far more subtle and sophisticated one appeared on August 23, 1971.  On that date, Lewis Powell, a corporate lawyer who would soon become a Supreme Court Justice, gave a friend at the Chamber of Commerce a memo entitled, Attack On American Free Enterprise System. As with the previous coup, this one was issued in response to the popularity of the New Deal and the Great Society in general, and regulations limiting corporate power in particular.  Powell outlined a strategy to defend against the “attack” and to counter attack against “disquieting voices.”  

The counter attack was a multi-billion dollar campaign funded by a few rich families and corporations who invested in this coup. They focused on: 1) creating a conservative infrastructure composed of foundations, think tanks, academic chairs, and media outlets; 2) discrediting government in general and regulations in particular, while glorifying free markets; and 3) developing sophisticated messaging to equip candidates and influence the public. In short, they set up to shape polls, change the national political dialogue, and virtually take the country over.

There may have been a few true-believers among the “government-is-bad, free-markets-are-good” gang, but it’s hard to see how. After all, the New Deal and the Great Society policies they railed against, had just delivered the longest, most equitably shared period of prosperity in our nation’s history. One has to wonder if it was that “equitably shared” aspect that rankled them.

A measure of their success is that we are now in the midst of the second longest period of economic growth in US history, but it features the least equitable distribution of economic gains in our nation’s history. 

So, from the beginning, the coup sought to divide, distract, deceive, and dissemble in the interests of gaining an ever-larger share of wealth and power. A key component of their coup was to appeal to prejudice, racism, jingoism, sexism, and a host of other “isms” to keep folks from realizing that wealth wasn’t trickling down; supply side strategies were merely enriching the rich; and that deregulating the financial community and the media, while gutting regulations protecting the environment, worker safety, food safety, and drug safety was hurting the vast majority of Americans while benefiting corporations and rich stockholders.

But this divide-and-conquer effort isn’t new.  It began in earnest with Reagan, when he kicked off his campaign in Philadelphia, Mississippi—the site of three racially motivated murders by the KKK—with a speech on state’s rights, no less.  This should have been the dog whistle heard round the world.

The party continued in this divide and conquer strategy, while they simultaneously ignited an all-out war on government.  Again, Reagan was the ideal spokesman.  In his first speech as president, he said, “…government is not the solution to our problem, government is the problem”—launching a relentless assault on governance that Republicans continue to this day.

While he worked diligently to discredit government, he extolled the virtues of the free market, claiming that it would deliver all good things by pure serendipity, if we could just get government out of the way. He also rolled back FCC rules, implemented a tax cut that benefited the rich, and railed against deficits, even as he chalked up record breaking deficits.

Over the years, the conservative agenda has failed virtually every time it’s been attempted. In fact, nationally, our three attempts to run our economy on their laissez-faire policies has presaged the three biggest economic downturns in our nation’s history. Meanwhile, at the state level, economies in states like Kansas and Louisiana, which adopted the conservative playbook, are tanking, while in those like New York and California—which raised taxes and increased regulations—are thriving.

But rather than acknowledging that their prescription wasn’t working, they doubled down on the lies, the divisiveness, the deceptions and the distractions—not surprising when you realize the whole point of the coup was to disable government for the purpose of concentrating power and wealth among the wealthy.

Again, these are hallmarks of the Republican Party today, and more to the point, they presage Trump’s assault on governance, his appointment of industry cronies while promising to drain the swamp, and his deficit-exploding tax cuts for the rich.  But most of all, they were part and parcel of the science-denying, fact-free, lying, truth-shredding GOP since Reagan. 

The press—abandoning truth and accuracy as its polestar and replacing them with balance—enabled this whole charade until Trump’s election.

But the only difference between Trump and the traditional Republican Party was that he made explicit, what had been implicit, exposing the rotten, hate-filled, blame-fueled, anti-science core of the Party to sunlight.  Republicans initially recoiled at this exposure, but when they saw it didn’t seem to matter in elections, they condoned it, even if they didn’t fully embrace it.

Which brings us to the Democrats

The only way Republicans could have gotten away with such an epic con, is if there were no one calling them on it.  And in fact, that’s the case.  As noted, what little of the press hadn’t been purchased outright by big corporations, neutered itself by a commitment to being “balanced”—as if fact and fiction could somehow be compromised into truth.

Not only did Democrats fail to take on the very obvious failings of the trickle-down, supply-side con, they embraced much of the right’s agenda, beginning with the DLC sellout under Clinton.  As Thomas Frank has pointed out:

Clinton had five major achievements as president: NAFTA, the Crime Bill of 1994, welfare reform, the deregulation of banks and telecoms, and the balanced budget. All of them—every single one—were  longstanding Republican objectives.

Democrats did this because they’d become dependent upon campaign contributions from the ultra-rich and corporations.  In short, the coup captured both of the major parties.

The present moment

Public attitude towards politicians, politics and government ranges from indifference to contempt to rage.  Anger and apathy are the reasons a small minority—just 27 percent—of passionately ignorant voters were able to elect Trump.  But as we approach the 2018 mid-terms there is a strong progressive wave playing out throughout the country.  Polls show that issues like health care (especially single payer strategies like Medicare for All), gun control, and a backlash on tax cuts for the rich are at the top of people’s concerns among Democrats, Independents and even many conservatives, and Republicans are on the wrong side of all these issues.

But the 2018 election will be about turnout.  Trump’s small minority of enraged voters will go to the polls.  If the Democratic Party were to adopt a national progressive agenda, turnout would remain high, as it has been in the recent off-year elections, when Democratic candidates ran to the left of center, and the party would win the House and quite possibly the Senate.

But astonishingly, Pelosi and Schumer just announced that their big idea for the 2018 election is a Pay-Go rule, and they’ve refused to embrace Medicare for All and other bold progressive ideas that are supported by a majority of Democrats and Independents.

For decades, Republicans have been holding Democrats hostage when they controlled the White House or Congress by screaming about deficits, all but crippling their ability to do anything bold to address the very real problems of middle class and working class Americans, then exploding the deficit when they got into office to give giant tax cuts to the rich and corporations.  Now, the Democrats seem to think it’s a great idea to spare the Republicans the trouble, by preemptively hamstringing themselves with this albatross.

Such gross incompetence would be funny if there weren’t so much at stake.

Read full story here

[tqtheater]

Recent editorials from Texas newspapers

Here are excerpts from recent editorials in Texas newspapers:

San Antonio Express-News. March 26, 2018.

Downtown San Antonio is a jewel, and a recent federal historic designation should help keep it that way.

Here’s the news: The National Park Service has designated downtown as a federal historic district. The district includes more than 200 buildings and properties, including 37 already listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

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Here’s what it means: Properties in the district are eligible for federal tax credits equal to 45 percent of renovation costs. That’s a huge financial benefit for restoring and maintaining significant history in our community. Think of the 2015 renovation of the St. Anthony Hotel as a good example of what’s possible. But this designation creates much-needed continuity.

We must admit to occasional walks across the district on brilliant and sunny days, pausing to admire the stunning details of the Scottish Rite Cathedral, replica of a Greek temple; the ornate details in the facades of the Southwestern Bell Building and the Emily Morgan Hotel; and many other displays of architectural inspiration.

Downtown San Antonio is packed with wondrous architecture.

When we talk about downtown, the focus is often on the new — development at The Pearl or in Southtown; revival of the San Pedro Creek; the symbolic shimmer of the new Frost Bank Tower; the tension created with new high-end housing and an obvious need for affordability.

But this designation, thanks to the work of the city’s Office of Historic Preservation, will help preserve our rich and layered architectural history. As the city continues to move forward, its residents will always be able to look back.

___

Houston Chronicle. March 26, 2018.

Those pesky teachers are at it again.

First they balk at the idea of packing heat in their classrooms. Now they have the audacity to encourage each other to vote.

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton apparently has some time on his hands, even though he’s fighting security fraud charges that could send him to prison for the rest of his life. His office has launched a fishing expedition against school administrators he suspects of "illegal electioneering."

The Texas Tribune reports the AG’s office sent open records requests to more than a dozen school districts, demanding copies of communications about voting in Texas primaries. Some of those districts also got slapped with cease and desist letters telling them to stop using taxpayer money to advocate for political candidates.

What we have here is the latest salvo in a battle between right-wing activists and school administrators encouraging teachers to vote. Educators across Texas are justifiably upset with Republican elected officials who’ve slashed school funding and failed to fix our broken school finance system. So anything that drives more teachers to the polls presumably would hurt GOP candidates on the ballot.

That’s what prompted the influential conservative group Empower Texans to launch a social media campaign encouraging teachers to snitch on educators engaging in electioneering. That’s also what led state Sen. Paul Bettencourt, R-Houston, to ask for an attorney general’s opinion saying that school districts shouldn’t incentivize voting by driving students and teachers to polling places.

No doubt a couple of administrators have stepped over the line. One superintendent posted a video encouraging teachers "to let the Texas Legislature know you’ve had enough." In at least two other districts, educators wrote questionable comments on official social media accounts; they didn’t name any politicians’ names, but they left no doubt they weren’t very happy with elected officials who’ve been cutting funding for public education.

Still, those examples don’t justify the attorney general’s office wasting a lot of time and energy trolling for superintendents and principals urging teachers to cast ballots. And let’s face it, there’s no doubt this heavy-handed action will serve the partisan purpose of discouraging school administrators from engaging in legitimate get-out-the-vote efforts.

This is the sort of behavior that threatens to stigmatize Texas Republicans as enemies of public education. Unless it wants to alienate a generation of Texas parents, the GOP doesn’t want to get stuck with that brand.

Our attorney general has more important job duties. This partisan battle against public school educators needs to come to an end.

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The Dallas Morning News. March 26, 2018.

After a deadly house explosion in northwest Dallas, Atmos Energy is facing two substantial repair jobs: Not only must it replace problematic pipes carrying natural gas but it also must improve communication lines with all its consumers.

Twelve-year-old Linda "Michellita" Rogers died Feb. 23 when her home was blown off its foundation. Since that tragedy, we’ve asked many questions of Atmos officials — on behalf of North Texas residents — regarding the safety of natural gas service.

Assurances from Atmos lean heavily on the several billion dollars it has invested in infrastructure since 2005 and its plans to spend more. Company executives also point to the safety regulations under which they operate and the training of field personnel.

Yet it’s understandable if residents don’t feel completely at ease, especially given Dallas Morning News investigative reporting that exposed new concerns.

Atmos officials who met with us last week were adamant that the company had no way to know the danger the Midway Hollow neighborhood potentially faced. They brought with them a consultant with expertise in civil engineering and geology who explained how heavy rains and unique soil composition created a "sudden and unexplainable" problem.

But in a preliminary report Friday, the National Transportation Safety Board said Atmos became aware of gas leaks in the neighborhood Jan. 1 and had made various repairs.

Records obtained by The News show that at least one emergency repair was ordered in January after Atmos found a leak in the alley behind Linda Rogers’ home. The company says that problem, which it described as non-hazardous, was repaired by Jan. 29. Additionally, gas-related house fires were reported nearby on Feb. 21 and 22.

Among The News’ other findings is that Atmos can take weeks or even months to fully repair the most dangerous types of gas leaks. Company leaders insist they take action immediately to eliminate any potential danger.

Atmos says it wants to be more open with customers and, as part of that effort, released a map last week that generally shows where steel, cast iron and plastic pipelines are located in Dallas.

The company says it has replaced 400 miles of cast iron pipes — generally the oldest in the system — in North Texas and plans to replace the remaining 400 miles.

While plastic pipes are the preferred choice, Atmos maintains the steel ones are safe. Yet in 2010 the Texas Railroad Commission considered requiring gas utilities to replace all steel lines following several North Texas explosions.

When asked about the decades-long timeline for replacing steel pipes, here was Atmos’ response: "Is it fast enough?" CEO Michael Haefner said. "That’s a good debate to have."

Answers like that are unnerving. As Atmos finishes the replacement of the entire gas distribution system in Midway Hollow, it needs to dig deeper to determine how best to restore consumer confidence.

Perhaps that’s a full accounting on its website of work being performed throughout the system or better explanations of what technicians finds during service calls. But giving customers the full facts is the next step in Atmos’ pledge for greater transparency and improved communication.

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Amarillo Globe-News. March 27, 2018.

Amarillo was part of the #marchforourlives event Saturday, a nationally organized demonstration/protest (depending on perspective) in support of increased gun control measures following a mass shooting at a high school in Florida.

Here is what Nell Newton, a minister at Amarillo Unitarian Universalist Fellowship who participated in Amarillo’s march, had to say regarding the event, "I wanted to support our youth because our youth are really seeing that things are not safe. Our youth are wondering what happened? Why did the adults not work to keep them safe?" (Amarillo takes part in the national conversation, March 24, amarillo.com.)

It is a valid question — why did the adults not work the keep kids safe?

This is a question that has many answers — if the question is looked at logically and not from a one-sided perspective.

For example, more gun laws and regulations will not change the fact that school administrators and officials failed to adequately address or respond to the myriad of problems and issues displayed by the shooter, at least in the case of the aforementioned Florida school shooting.

Syndicated columnist Ann Coulter has detailed mistakes made by school administration, most recently in a column in Amarillo Globe-News. (Coulter: Make Dems run on ‘school to prison pipeline’, March 19, amarillo.com.) We doubt many of the young people who participated in a #marchforourlives event (especially in Amarillo) are aware of this failure by the school, especially since many in national media have ignored these facts because they do not fit the gun control agenda.

And the constant blame of the National Rifle Association is tiresome and illogical.

According to www.opensecrets.org, the NRA ranked 154th out of 3,798 entities in 2016 in terms of money spent on lobbying, and No. 490 of 18,910 in contributions.

Follow the money — the political influence of the NRA is overrated, which is supported by the numbers, if one bothers to look.

Are some politicians fervently in favor of the Second Amendment? Yes, but this fact has more to do with politicians doing what is necessary to reflect what the voters back home want and support rather than a special interest group which ranked 490th in terms of contributions in 2016.

Young people need to understand that the gun used to commit death and carnage is often the final step in a descent into crime, evil and insanity – a fall that far too often can and should be noticed before a person legally or illegally obtains a gun.

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Victoria Advocate. March 27, 2018.

The Victoria city and county officials have released a copy of the 929-page emergency plan.

The plan is designed to be the official handbook of how to be prepared for and respond to emergencies ranging from floods to hazardous material spills to nuclear cite crisis and natural disasters such as hurricanes.

The plan has been held so close to the vest of select officials for many years that even elected officials were not privy to the information until recently when city Councilmember Jeff Bauknight asked for a copy of the plan so he could have informed answers when the public needed information.

The Advocate also asked for a copy of the plan in early December, but was told no because it contained confidential material. But after learning other counties have posted their plans online, local officials changed their minds and agreed to release it after information they deemed confidential was redacted.

The plan is on the website now for anyone to read, the way it should have been all along.

Releasing the emergency plan is the right step. At the very least, the public can now get more informed, involved and better prepared.

It will allow the public an opportunity to volunteer to be a part of the committees the plan calls for to be set up prior to disasters.

It will help all in city and county governments be prepared for the next disaster when it happens.

We are doubtful many will take the time to read all 929 pages of the plan. To say it is not light reading is fairly accurate. But it is divided into sections that allow the public to pick sections that interest them.

Unfortunately at this time the plan is only a document online and not interactive and not searchable by topic. It does contain a two-page table of contents at the beginning of the plan.

As the emergency management officials begin working on the new plan, it is important for all to include lessons learned from Hurricane Harvey and other disasters so preparation for the recovery is already in place before the disaster.

A good example of the city doing this was pre-contracting for debris removal, which meant the contractor was in town soon after it was safe for workers to begin to clear the debris.

This also locked in the city on a set cost and expectations for the contractor, cutting out needless lost time to negotiate after the disaster.

The city is also taking the right steps now by having a consultant look at its water supply needs so it can be prepared with the right equipment to keep the water supply running to the city.

While we applaud the city for taking these steps, we question why they did not do a full damage assessment for private property. It is not credible to say the assessment was not needed because the federal disaster declaration had been granted.

This information would have greatly helped not only the city, but also nonprofits and recovery groups to know how badly the city was damaged and where the needs are for helping in the recovery.

We are also concerned that required parts of the plan were not followed. It appears the preparation for this storm was not carried out months beforehand.

Plans are developed for reasons — to be used and referred to so everyone is fully prepared when a disaster hits — not to sit on a shelf, never to be looked at until the disaster hits. Preparation takes time and energy, but if it is done properly, it will save time and energy after the disaster when time and organization are crucial.

As officials work to update this plan, hopefully this spring before the June 1 start of hurricane season, let’s hope all the planners take the past year’s experience to heart and make a plan that will work, including developing committees that will help the emergency operations be prepared and organized.

The public needs to be part of the planning as well, so we will have a better informed community that can pull together to successfully recover from a disaster no matter the level.

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